Pedagogies for the Post-Anthropocene: Lessons from Apocalypse, Revolution & Utopia (Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, 14) 9811657874, 9789811657870

Citation preview

Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 14 Series Editors: Aaron Koh · Victoria Carrington

Esther Priyadharshini

Pedagogies for the Post-Anthropocene Lessons from Apocalypse, Revolution & Utopia

Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education Volume 14

Series Editors Aaron Koh, Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong Victoria Carrington, School of Education, University of Tasmania, Launceston, TAS, Australia

We live in a time where the complex nature and implications of social, political and cultural issues for individuals and groups is increasingly clear. While this may lead some to focus on smaller and smaller units of analysis in the hope that by understanding the parts we may begin to understand the whole, this book series is premised on the strongly held view that researchers, practitioners and policy makers interested in education will increasingly need to integrate knowledge gained from a range of disciplinary and theoretical sources in order to frame and address these complex issues. A transdisciplinary approach takes account the uncertainty of knowledge and the complexity of social and cultural issues relevant to education. It acknowledges that there will be unresolved tensions and that these should be seen as productive. With this in mind, the reflexive and critical nature of cultural studies and its focus on the processes and currents that construct our daily lives has made it a central point of reference for many working in the contemporary social sciences and education. This book series seeks to foreground transdisciplinary and cultural studies influenced scholarship with a view to building conversations, ideas and sustainable networks of knowledge that may prove crucial to the ongoing development and relevance of the field of educational studies. The series will place a premium on manuscripts that critically engage with key educational issues from a position that draws from cultural studies or demonstrates a transdisciplinary approach. This can take the form of reports of new empirical research, critical discussions and/or theoretical pieces. In addition, the series editors are particularly keen to accept work that takes as its focus issues that draw from the wider Asia Pacific region but that may have relevance more globally, however all proposals that reflect the diversity of contemporary educational research will be considered. Series Editors: Aaron Koh (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) Victoria Carrington (University of Tasmania) Editorial Board: Angel Lin (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Angelia Poon (National Institute of Education, Singapore), Anna Hickey-Moody (RMIT, Australia), Barbara Comber (University of South Australia, Australia), Catherine Beavis (Deakin University, Australia), Cameron McCarthy (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA), Chen Kuan-Hsing (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan), C.  J. W.-L.  Wee (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Daniel Goh (National University of Singapore, Singapore), Jackie Marsh (University of Sheffield, UK), Jane Kenway (Monash University, Australia), Jennifer A Sandlin (Arizona State University, Tempe, USA), Jennifer Rowsell (University of Bristol, UK), Jo-Anne Dillabough, (University of Cambridge, UK), Megan Watkins (University of Western Sydney, Australia), Mary Lou Rasmussen (Australia National University, Australia), Terence Chong (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore) Book proposals for this series may be submitted to Associate Editor: Lay Peng Ang E-mail: [email protected] More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/11200

Esther Priyadharshini

Pedagogies for the Post-Anthropocene Lessons from Apocalypse, Revolution & Utopia

Esther Priyadharshini University of East Anglia Norwich, UK

ISSN 2345-7708     ISSN 2345-7716 (electronic) Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education ISBN 978-981-16-5787-0    ISBN 978-981-16-5788-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5788-7 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

For Ethan and David And a thousand alternative futures

Contents

1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 Youth ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    4 1.2 Futures��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    6 1.3 Education����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    7 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    9 2 Thinking-Making-Doing Futures Research������������������������������������������   13 2.1 Posthumanism at the Anthropocene������������������������������������������������   14 2.2 Post-qualitative Research����������������������������������������������������������������   16 2.3 Futures-Making Research ��������������������������������������������������������������   17 2.4 Studying With ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   18 2.5 Speculative Narratives��������������������������������������������������������������������   23 2.6 Meanwhiles ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   25 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   26 3 Part I: Apocalypse������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   29 3.1 The Apocalyptic Imaginary������������������������������������������������������������   29 3.2 ‘They Never Go There…’ ��������������������������������������������������������������   33 3.3 Not Worth Convincing Them…������������������������������������������������������   37 3.4 Prove Me Wrong… ������������������������������������������������������������������������   41 3.5 Beyond the Singular Narrative��������������������������������������������������������   44 3.6 Apocalypse as Frame of Intelligibility��������������������������������������������   45 3.7 Cathedral Thinking ������������������������������������������������������������������������   50 3.8 Lessons from the Apocalypse ��������������������������������������������������������   55 3.9 Meanwhile…����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   56   3.9.1   The Curriculum Vitae����������������������������������������������������������   56   3.9.2   Career Maps������������������������������������������������������������������������   58 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   60

vii

viii

Contents

4 Part II: Revolution ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   63 4.1 Studying the Movement������������������������������������������������������������������   65 4.2 Scale and Profile of School Climate Strikes (SCS)������������������������   66 4.3 Youth Activism and Organisation ��������������������������������������������������   69 4.4 Organisational Websites and Social Media������������������������������������   72 4.5 Wresting Control and the Push Back����������������������������������������������   78 4.6 The Friday Spectacles ��������������������������������������������������������������������   80 4.7 A Public Pedagogy for Alternative Futures������������������������������������   88 4.8 Meanwhile…����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   92 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   94 5 Part III: Utopia����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   99 5.1 Utopia as a Concept and a Method ������������������������������������������������   99 5.2 The Utopias of Afrofuturism����������������������������������������������������������  103 5.3 Octavia Butler’s Critical Utopia������������������������������������������������������  106   5.3.1   Mapping the Terrain������������������������������������������������������������  107   5.3.2   Creating the ‘Common’������������������������������������������������������  108   5.3.3   Posthuman Theology����������������������������������������������������������  109   5.3.4   An Unorthodox Politics������������������������������������������������������  110   5.3.5   Radical Imagination and Unorthodox Pathways����������������  112 5.4 N.K. Jemisin’s Sensory Utopias������������������������������������������������������  113   5.4.1   Refusing the Suffering of Others����������������������������������������  113   5.4.2   Sensory Materialism ����������������������������������������������������������  117   5.4.3  The Dystopia of Social Hierarchy and Extractive Relations ����������������������������������������������������  120   5.4.4  The Possibility of New Peoples and Non-extractive Relations����������������������������������������������  122 5.5 Okorafor’s Africanfuturist, Decolonised Utopia����������������������������  124   5.5.1 Indigenous Materialisms������������������������������������������������������  124   5.5.2 Ecological Hybridity������������������������������������������������������������  127   5.5.3 The Decolonised University��������������������������������������������������  128   5.5.4 Space and Belonging������������������������������������������������������������  130 5.6 Imagining Utopias, Educating Desires ������������������������������������������  131 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  133 6 Pedagogies for a Post-Anthropocene World������������������������������������������  137 6.1 Pedagogies of Apocalypse��������������������������������������������������������������  138 6.2 Pedagogies of Revolution ��������������������������������������������������������������  140 6.3 Pedagogies of Utopia����������������������������������������������������������������������  142 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  143

Chapter 1

Introduction

I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable, epochs to come that can replenish refuge. Donna Haraway (2015, 160)

The three interconnected imperatives of this Haraway quote encapsulate the main concerns of this book – how we go about this job of making the Anthropocene short/thin; how we cultivate alternative epochs that replenish refuge; and how to do this in a multitude of ways  – ‘in every way imaginable’. Making other kinds of futures has never not been the global challenge, but one that feels sharply urgent after 2020 when wave after wave of events have challenged any notion that we can continue ‘as usual’ – the global school climate strikes born out of despair at our maddening apathy in the face of an undeniable climate crisis, a global pandemic and its exacerbation of inequalities, the grief and passion arising from the death of George Floyd, and the activist energies of the global Black Lives Matter movement. Each global crisis has combined with more local events such as the presidential elections in the USA or the aftermath of Brexit in the UK or the future of protest/ democracy in Hong Kong, Nigeria, and Burma or a myriad other matters to produce further uncertainty. Equally, there has never been a ‘better’ time to exploit the desire to alter the old normal, and craft much more equitable, sustainable, and just futures that diminish the Anthropocene. This book arises out of this moment in time and attempts to do this from the triple perspectives of educational, youth, and futures studies. Every field and discipline at this juncture is obliged to confront the task of what it needs to become in creating new geological epochs. Creating or altering epochs depends as much on priming our beings to the scale of this task, as speeding to craft new terrains of study and methodology, assembling organisational/policy arrangements, or seeking tech-bio-economic solutions. Integral to this priming is becoming sensitive to pruning old habits and initiating new habits of imagination or, as Emily Dickinson (1960) puts it, to light the slow fuse of the possible through imagination. Such priming also allows us to pay attention to the temporal tensions of an ‘emergency’ that requires slow, deep time, visionary planning – ‘cathedral thinking’. The book is interested in the many ways we may attend to and learn from imaginaries of the future so that we can play a part in the work of reimagining academic endeavour © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 E. Priyadharshini, Pedagogies for the Post-Anthropocene, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5788-7_1

1

2

1 Introduction

to make different futures. This twofold task – of imagining new epochs and imagining new disciplinary fields that will look and do different in ushering in those futures – implies scary, risky, and fundamental change. It is not even about asking new questions but about raising the questions that we now perceive as forbidden or unthinkable (Weinstein & Colebrook, 2017) because they may be part of a world that does not yet exist. Faced with such a difficult challenge, how can we develop imaginaries of the future that will instigate newness/nextness that will not fit with received discourses on futures, which will challenge majoritarian organisation (Deleuze, 1995) in order to create epochs of refuge? This book suggests that we start by looking at some of these imaginaries that are readily present in youth narratives today. As Rebecca Coleman’s (2020) work on future politics suggests, it is about recognising alternative imaginations and worlds that already exist but remain muted or unrecognisable within neoliberal, capitalist framings. Such imaginaries of the future arise as a critique of the present social, political, and cultural order. They are often rooted in the real and move to more fantastic realms too and reveal emotions and desires they engender in individual and collective groups. They are not shared evenly by all youth or even youth in specific locations, but they do allow us to glimpse common desires for a future across different spaces and identities (Strauss, 2006). I view these visions as pedagogical, that they reveal what we are and where we are heading and prompt questions of where we might want to go. Thus, they are teaching-­ learning moments that signal how we get to these more desirable places. They are also generative of new desires and have a cascading effect on how we shape and practice everyday pedagogies ourselves. The notion of pedagogy used here is one that has been theorised and explored by a range of scholars who claim that it is much more than what is driven by human intent and agency within classrooms (Wallin, 2017; Chen, 2012; Ellsworth, 2005; Hickey-Moody, 2013a, b; Probyn, 2004; Snaza et al., 2014) but also, powerfully shaped, by ‘more-than-human impersonal forces, intensities, or affects that traverse bodies’ (Niccolini, 2016, p. 232). The Anthropocene is also that moment/force that abounds with pedagogical potential. This perspective has been set to work in the realm of everyday lives (Hickey, 2016), particularly of young people, focusing on their expressions of issues that are not always accounted for within educational institutions. As I explain later, ‘studying with’ these moments opens up lessons for re-making futures and disciplinary fields. To attend to such matters that fall between disciplinary obligations, I have relied on perspectives from fields that are perched across/between established disciplines – cultural studies, futures studies, youth studies, etc., and drawn from non-­ academic terrains (fiction, essay, movies, etc.) that contribute hugely to our learning but which can go uncredited in the genre of academic writing. The use of the term ‘pedagogy’ is deliberate, to signal how powerful teaching-learning moments of life can be excluded from the purview of education when they fall outside formal arrangements. The larger point is that in seeking to build a post-Anthropocene world, disciplines and fields may need to respond to and valorise matters that are currently deemed beyond their remit.

1 Introduction

3

Imaginaries have a temporal quality in that they tend to be of their time and will morph with changing conditions. The recognition of our current planetary epoch as the Anthropocene – a confrontation of humankind’s cumulative effect discernible in the ecological conditions of the planet – powerfully shapes our contemporary imaginaries of the future. The quarrels over how we ought to name this moment (Chwalczyk, 2020) drive our understanding, bringing forth new analytic frames that shape our conceptualisations and our practices. We have been shown how, when the centrality of racist, capitalist exploitation of labour and material in the formation of the Anthropocene is erased or at best is seen as a supplementary analytical perspective (Yusoff, 2018), and then it becomes a tool to consolidate whiteness (Mirzoeff, 2016). These sharp debates shape our sensing of possible, more equitable futures as much as the possibility of a future without humans at all (Colebrook, 2014). Identifying and learning from opportunities offered by such imagined futures can be generative of desires, which Abensour (1999) identifies as the utopian space of education: where one can desire more, desire better, and desire otherwise. Three dominant imaginaries have been noted as being instrumental in shaping human understanding of prehistory, the time before Homo sapien existence on the planet: Apocalypse, Revolution, and Utopia.1 This is a useful reminder that even before human existence, planetary events took place that we can describe as apocalyptic, revolutionary, or utopian and that this will likely repeat after human existence. My research encounters with young people over the last few years suggested that these are also their dominant imaginaries of the future and thus will be examined in turn, in this book. The aim of this engagement with the three imaginaries of the future is to seek out pedagogies they contain that reveal the possibilities for a post-Anthropocene epoch. Imagining a way to the post-Anthropocene, another geological epoch, is precisely in the scale of the kind of cathedral thinking we are called to do – to plan and build knowing we will never see the fruits of such labour. I would like to note that these imaginaries were rarely articulated clearly, nor neatly compartmentalised in young people’s conversations or imaginations, and neither were they perceived as following one another in any chronological, linear, or even iterative way. They emerged as useful for making sense of youth expressions of the future and are separated for the purposes of analysis and argument in this book. They are also useful to articulate the connections between the three cornerstones of this enquiry: youth, futures, and education.

1  Prehistory: A Modern Enigma, Exhibition at the Pompidou Center, Paris, 2019, curated by Cécile Debray, Rémi Labrusse and Maria Stavrinaki.

4

1 Introduction

1.1  Youth Young people below 16 or 18 cannot vote in many representative democracies. They cannot directly access the structural levers to legislate to control climate change or to increase funding for youth spaces, health, or education or improve their life chances or increase social justice or reduce inequalities more generally. Their perspectives, generally speaking, are not prominent in news or, indeed, political agendas. Where youth desires and the accompanying politics for better futures are articulated, they are easy to dismiss as naïve or unrealisable. Perhaps it is worth considering if this built-in alienation of youth as category offers an unexpected opening in the ongoing efforts to dismantle what has come to be known as ‘the human’. These efforts largely look beyond and outwards (to animal and material assemblages) as well as within and inwards to those humans traditionally excluded from the category (the indigenous, colonised, enslaved). This book asks if these efforts could more consciously include ‘youth’ too. Young people can still be narrowly imagined, perhaps as fragments of the future (Lee 2011), as beings asked to project themselves into the not-yet-to-imagine future selves, even to defer gratification for some future prize (Adam & Groves, 2007). Such problematic models of youth/childhood have been critiqued for constraining their beings in the service of nostalgic adult agendas (Bruhm & Hurley, 2004) and for overriding young peoples’ desires and narratives for the future (Bateman, 2014). In contrast, these figures – child/youth – have the ability to be thought tools (Hickey-­ Moody, 2013c), theoretical consoles (Carrington, 2018), or heuristic devices (Threadgold, 2020) that can challenge old norms and offer new ways of re-thinking practice and policy. In this, they are already our teachers and fellow learners. In the field of education, children and youth are most often positioned as the subjects that education seeks to shape. The telos of education is tied to their future selves – becoming employable, or a good citizen. Preparing them for their futures is usually approached clinically, supported by programmes that seek to engender rational decision makers who will direct their desires and fashion their future desired selves appropriately. But youth desires tend to be not so containable and are known to anticipate and dream of futures beyond mapped-out, plausible, and permitted trajectories (Priyadharshini, 2019). This ‘uncontainable’ quality can be a vital critical tool in the broader project of reconceiving how societies/cultures/disciplinary fields organise the future as a horizon to act towards (Appadurai, 2013). And along with their ability to grasp the ungraspable (for instance in demonstrating their understanding of climate change as an extinction level event through the School Climate Strikes of 2019), they can be figures that mock myopic academic practices and agendas and provide the impetus for imagining alternative ones. Thus, in the enterprise of making the post-Anthropocene, they are also a tool to ‘study futures with’, a potential corrective to the neoliberal, humanist framework through which they themselves tend to be seen. This orientation has implications for research with youth. Notwithstanding recent improvements in methodological practices  – such as the growth of participatory

1.1 Youth

5

research approaches that seek to alleviate power imbalances, or the welcome use of sensory and art-based interventions that may be more inclusive and could hold more appeal for the young (Lyon & Carabelli, 2016; Coleman, 2017; Ivinson & Renold, 2013; Springgay & Truman, 2019)  – the ethical and political stakes of inter-­ generational research have further escalated in a context when youth demand better, more truthful, more responsible, and reciprocal interactions with adults on a range of matters. The young speak of the burden of ‘truth-telling’ (Thunberg, 2019) and other intolerable forms of ‘debt’ that they keep inheriting from older generations. School climate strikers around the globe have explicitly made the argument that learning in school is meaningless if adults cannot offer them a meaningful future to look forward to. Such understandings affect the politics of ‘inter-generational research’ and require us to attend more thoughtfully to the dynamics of the research relationships between young and old, of how these relations are conceptualised or approached, built, or sustained. Writer Rebecca Solnit (2020) recently addressed this dynamic in a piece about her own learning from younger feminists: One of the pernicious myths of our time is that wisdom accumulates with age in some steady, standard way, like tree rings. In this scheme, the old have it and the young lack it, and should open their little beaks and wait for a worm of wisdom to be dropped in. Told this way, wisdom is also the result of individual development, rather than of how we as a society become better at seeing something, smarter about knowing how something works. … Me, I admire and am grateful to the young… and learn a lot from them – not any one big truth but a host of insights that have gradually shifted my understanding, and given me new tools to use. What I find in so many young… is a clarity and confidence about their rights, needs, and truths that feels new and different. … For this collective awakening, the young often lead by being more demanding, less willing to settle, less willing to believe that something is impossible….

This sentiment about learning from the young, not one rooted in a romanticised notion of youth as the vanguard of progressive knowledge, but acquired through paying attention to those moments when youth, as thought tools, heuristic devices or theoretical consoles, are able to crystallise forms of collective wisdom and offer new openings will echo throughout the book. It highlights an imperative to hear youth voices and concerns in educational and cultural/public spheres, including those views which might ‘confound’ adults (Gough, 1990) and to engage in a manner that enhances their significance within knowledge generation processes. The book is thus also an attempt to hear the kinds of pedagogies for the futures that youth desire and which they already demonstrate in a variety of educational, cultural, and political sites.

6

1 Introduction

1.2  Futures The words ‘future’ or ‘futures’ tend to arrive prefixed by qualifiers such as ‘precarious’ or ‘uncertain.’ They conjure associations of intangibility, nebulousness, and contingency, posing challenges for all involved in education  – be they students/ learners, policy-makers, practitioners/teachers, or researchers. How we understand ‘futures’ matters as it influences our capacity to envision and act (Facer, 2011). There is a growing body of literature across social science disciplines that treats ‘futures’ as a live subject of research (Adam & Groves, 2007; Appadurai, 2013; Anderson, 2010; Colebrook, 2014; Poli, 2011) and explores the sorts of methodological innovations required for such study (Salazar et  al., 2017; Wilkie et  al., 2017; Coleman & Tutton, 2017). A range of typologies and conceptual frameworks have emerged as schema to engage with futures: doing-knowing-caring (Adam & Groves, 2007); styles-practices-logics (Anderson, 2010); and exploiting research as a change agent to bring forth new futures (Bell, 2009). Sociologists (Levitas, 2017) ask us to focus on how institutions and practices can be re-engineered to make alternative futures. Futures anthropologists (Salazar et al., 2017) argue for looking closer at the ‘messy’ ways in which futures emerge as contingent on a configuration of several elements coalescing and constantly evolving, including our affective orientations (Bryant & Knight, 2019). Engaging with such diverse conceptualisations challenges us to think outside our disciplinary and ontological comfort zones, in the spaces that exceed positivism and humanist empiricism. These emerging orientations all ask us to develop abilities to look at the future, rather than into it. They tend to reject the idea of the future as something to be predicted or conquered or even treated as an extension of the present. If older unsatisfactory paradigms – that may contribute to human inequality or ecocide – are to be replaced, these may be the changes that support a step change in how ‘the future’ is understood. In particular, they require going beyond traditional predictive logics/ rationalities that aim for a ‘programmable’ tomorrow, to more critical speculative and anticipatory practices that are open to the unknowable and seek to create radical futures that are not tied to exploitative capitalist or modernist or humanist teleologies. This means attending to new states of emergence and emergency (Tsing, 2011), requiring researchers and scholars, rather paradoxically, to become ‘experts in not knowing’ while still seeking opportunities for interventive practices (Pink & Salazar, 2017). This shift in thinking calls for new research habits, different practices of paying attention, intervention, and experimentation. Without a conscious commitment to a radically different idea of futures, these futures are likely to be more of the same or worse. What these new research habits, practices of attention, intervention, and experimentation can look like is the challenge currently being grasped/grappled with, in infinitely varied ways. This book’s focus is on youthful imaginaries of futures, drawn from the youth cultural realm, global youth surveys, data emerging through fieldwork, and speculative fiction featuring youthful (human or other) protagonists. It looks at instances of imaginaries of apocalypse, revolution, and utopia to see what lessons they hold for

1.3 Education

7

this moment within the Anthropocene. In this sense, this is not just a study about imaginaries of possible futures but a study with them, for ‘the now’.

1.3  Education Research combining futures and education tends to be described as being about ‘futures education’ or ‘educational futures’. Futures education is often discussed as programmatic, i.e. as relating to the programme by which learners – young people/ children/adults – are educated about and, for possible futures, is seen to be about the curriculum (what) and pedagogy (how). Educational futures (or the futures of education) seems to be about what education as a field of practice and research ought to look like in the future and relates to its long-term identity and purpose. These two perspectives are of course related and if we look closely, they begin to melt into each other. This book is more interested in why education as a field needs to transform itself, in order to meet the challenges of the epoch. What it is less keen on is making predictions or forecasts of what education will look like. That is, it wishes for education to treat the future as an indeterminate phenomena, and which therefore can be created/co-constructed through practices of critical anticipation in the present (Amsler & Facer, 2017). Already, the most stringent criticisms levelled against the field of education arise when it defines its telos, its desired end point, too narrowly. This has raised fundamental questions about education’s relationship with both the future and young people. Current ‘anticipatory regimes’ in schooling (Amsler & Facer, 2017) position education more as a device that feeds into a programmable future than as a live process that continually gives rise to multiple, unknowable futures. Educational practices in such regimes can over-value the pre-plannable and predictive, confining visions of the future to pragmatic registers, sidelining more radical desires and possibilities (Wallin, 2014; Priyadharshini, 2019). The neoliberal moves that prioritise education’s focus on skills and employability position children/young people as the future workforce emphasising the need for ‘flexibility’ in precarious employment markets have drawn much criticism, but still continue to exist alongside carefully contained instances of critical thinking. As the ongoing global school strikes for climate change show, for many young people, the relationship between education and their futures can be seized for symbolic and political purposes. Echoed in the demands to ‘Teach the Future’, there is a sense that contemporary education is not doing enough to foster learning for futures that are not predicated on conditions of neoliberal capitalism. Such movements demand an explicit reorientation of education as a creative, interventive co-­ creator of futures than as a fear-induced insurance or as a corrective for uncertain futures (Facer, 2016; Facer et al., 2011). The epoch of the Anthropocene thus necessitates a critical look at academia, its disciplinary organisation and priorities. From the perspective of the ongoing and increasing extinction of life forms (and life itself), the continuing valorisation of

8

1 Introduction

disciplinary divisions and preoccupations seem inadequate as a response. At this juncture, the constitution of academic labour under the divisions of natural sciences, social sciences, or humanities feels anachronistic. The pressing urgencies of the Anthropocene ask us to introduce newness into academic endeavour, whether this is around the minutiae of everyday labour as currently organised or in posing the blasphemous questions around the functioning of the stratified and segmented nature of disciplinary taxonomies. These arrangements render some subfields, such as early childhood education and environmental or sustainability education, more suited to address issues related to the Anthropocene while most of the wider field remains undisturbed. If all are to take up Haraway’s task – this book is, of course, written from the perspective that this is no longer an option – then questions regarding what customs, habits, and practices need to be lost (perhaps what needs to become less important) and what narratives and alternatives need to replace them, and for what purpose, need answering. The book also draws on traditions that look to popular, cultural spaces/media to learn from and rejuvenate more formal education (Lysgaard et al., 2019; Bowman, 2013; Alvermann et  al., 2018; Carrington et  al., 2018). Sites of literature, sport, music, dance, or drama prompt affective responses and are known to generate subjective changes in participants (Hickey-Moody, 2009), and they offer opportunities to demonstrate posthumanist pedagogies in action and ways of addressing the challenges posed by the age in novel ways. The questions of ‘who’ is teaching ‘whom’, ‘how’, ‘what’, and ‘why’ can all be reconceptualised through engagement with such domains. These perspectives understand education as an enmeshed process involving human, animal, and material elements. Such posthumanist perspectives do not suggest that inequalities between humans are no longer of relevance, but that such inequalities may be pursued as a problem that is, in fact, tied to a humanist perspective largely oblivious to life on an interdependent planet. In sum, we are asked to rethink the traditions around intergenerational and humanist relations and how we can newly understand adult-child/youth, learner-teacher, human-non-human roles as part of educational endeavours (Juelskjaer, 2020). In seeking to addressing these myriad, interconnected challenges, this book suggests that education pays attention to the imagination. This is hardly a new suggestion but one that can feel different when approached with the intention of ushering in the post-Anthropocene. As Maxine Greene (2009) has repeatedly said, ‘To commit to imagining is to commit to looking beyond the given, beyond what appears to be unchangeable. It is a way of warding off the apathy and the feelings of futility that are the greatest obstacles to any sort of learning and, surely, to education for freedom’. This book gathers together some of the lessons that the youthful imaginaries of apocalypse, revolution, or utopia offer for how we start ending the Anthropocene and begin creating the post-Anthropocene.

References

9

References Abensour, M. (1999). William Morris and the politics of romance. In M.  Blechman (Ed.), Revolutionary romanticism. City Lights Books. Adam, B., & Groves, C. (2007). Future matters: Action, knowledge, ethics. Brill publishers. Alvermann, D., Moon, J., Hagwood, M., & Hagood, M. (2018). Popular culture in the classroom: Teaching and researching critical media literacy. Routledge. Amsler, S., & Facer, K. (2017). Contesting anticipatory regimes in education: Exploring alternative educational orientations to the future. Futures, 94, 6–14. Anderson, B. (2010). Preemption, precaution, preparedness: Anticipatory action and future geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 34, 777–798. Appadurai, A. (2013). The future as cultural fact: Essays on the global condition. Verso Publishers. Bateman, D. (2014). Untangling teachers’ images of their futures through their responses to the futures narratives of children. Journal of Futures Studies, 18(3), 41–56. Bell, W. (2009). Foundations of futures studies: History, purposes, knowledge. Volume I: Human science for a new era. Transaction Publishers. Bowman, P. (2013). Popular cultural pedagogy, in theory; Or: What can cultural theory learn about learning from popular culture? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45(6), 601–609. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2012.723884 Bruhm, S., & Hurley, N. (2004). Curiouser: On the queerness of children. University of Minneapolis Press. Bryant, R., & Knight, D. M. (2019). The anthropology of the future. Cambridge University Press. Carrington, V. (2018). The changing landscape of literacies: Big data and algorithms. Digital Culture and Education, 10(1), 67–76. Carrington, V., Rowsell, J., Priyadharshini, E., & Westrup, R. (Eds.). (2018). Generation Z: Zombies, popular culture and educating youth. Springer. Chen, M. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press. Chwałczyk, F. (2020). Around the Anthropocene in eighty names – Considering the Urbanocene proposition. Sustainability, 12, 4458. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12114458 Colebrook, C. (2014). Death of the post-human: Essays on extinction (Vol. 1). Open Humanities Press. Coleman, R. (2017). A sensory sociology of the future: Affect, hope and inventive methodologies. The Sociological Review, 65(3), 525–543. Coleman, R. (2020). Glitterworlds: The future politics of a ubiquitous thing. Goldsmiths Press. Coleman, R., & Tutton, R. (2017). Introduction to special issue of sociological review on ‘futures in question: Theories, methods, practices’. The Sociological Review, 65(3), 440–447. Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972–1990. Columbia University Press. Dickinson, E. (1960). The gleam of an heroic act. In The complete poems. Little Brown. Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. Routledge. Facer, K. (2011). Learning futures: Education, technology and social change. Routledge. Facer, K. (2016). Using the future in education: Creating space for openness, hope and novelty. In H. E. Lees & N. Noddings (Eds.), The Palgrave international handbook of alternative education (pp. 52–67). Palgrave Macmillan. Facer, K., Craft, A., Jewitt, C., Mauger, S., Sandford, R., & Sharples, M. (2011). Building agency in the face of uncertainty: A thinking tool for educators and education leaders. Retrieved August 14, 2020, from http://richardsandford.net/edfutures/wp-­content/uploads/2011/06/ Building-­Agency-­in-­the-­Face-­of-­Uncertainty-­Thinking-­Tool.pdf Gibbons, A., & Snake-Beings, E. (2018). DiY (do-it-yourself) pedagogy: A future-less orientation to education. Open Review of Educational Research, 5(1), 28–42. Greene, M. (2009). Coda: The slow fuse of change. Obama, the Schools, Imagination and Convergence. Harvard Educational Review Summer 2009. Gough, N. (1990). Futures in Australian education—tacit, token and taken for granted. Futures, 22(3), 298–310. https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(90)90149-C

10

1 Introduction

Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 159–165. Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. Research Collection, Lee Kong Chian School Of Business. Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/ lkcsb_research/5025 Hickey, A. (Ed.). (2016). The pedagogies of cultural studies. Routledge. Hickey-Moody, A.  C. (2009). Unimaginable bodies: Intellectual disability, performance and becomings. Brill Sense. Hickey-Moody, A. (2013a). Youth, arts and education: Reassembling subjectivity through affect. Routledge. Hickey-Moody, A. (2013b). Affect as method: Feelings, aesthetics and affective pedagogy. In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 79–95). Edinburgh University Press. Hickey-Moody, A.  C. (2013c). Deleuze’s children. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45(3), 272–286. Ivinson, G., & Renold, E. (2013). Subjectivity, affect and place: Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs to explore a young girl’s becomings in a post-industrial locale. Subjectivity, 6(4), 369–390. Juelskjær, M. (2020). Mattering pedagogy in precarious times of (un) learning. Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 1(1), 52–79. Lee, N. (2011). Childhood and biopolitics: Climate change, bio-science and human futures. Palgrave Macmillian. Levitas, R. (2017). Where there is no vision, the people perish: A utopian ethic for a transformed future. Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity. http://www.cusp.ac.uk/wp-­ content/uploads/05-­Ruth-­Levitas-­Essay-­online.pdf Lyon, D., & Carabelli, G. (2016). Researching young people’s orientations to the future: The methodological challenges of using arts practice. Qualitative Research, 16(4), 430–445. Lysgaard, J. A., Bengtsson, S., & Laugesen, M. H. L. (2019). Dark pedagogy: Education, horror and the Anthropocene. Springer. Mirzoeff, N. (2016). It’s not the Anthropocene, it’s the white supremacy scene; or, the geological color line. In R. Grusin (Ed.), After extinction (pp. 123–149). University of Minnesota Press. Niccolini, A. (2016). Animate affects: Censorship, reckless pedagogies, and beautiful feelings. Gender and Education, 28(2), 230–249. Pink, S., & Salazar, J. (2017). Anthropologies and futures: Setting the agenda. In J.  Salazar, S. Pink, A. Irving, & J. Sjoberg (Eds.), Anthropologies and futures: Researching emerging and uncertain worlds (pp. 3–22). Bloomsbury. Poli, R. (2011). Steps towards an explicit ontology of the future. Futures, 16(1), 67–78. Priyadharshini, E. (2019). Anticipating the apocalypse: Monstrous educational futures. Futures, 113(102453), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102453 Probyn, E. (2004). Teaching bodies: Affects in the classroom. Body & Society, 10(4), 21–43. Salazar, J., Pink, S., Irving, A., & Sjoberg, J. (Eds.). (2017). Anthropologies and futures: Researching emerging and uncertain worlds. Bloomsbury. Snaza, N., Appelbaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M., Rotas, N., Sandlin, J., Wallin, J., & Weaver, J. A. (2014). Toward a posthuman education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 39–55. Solnit, R. (2020, February 29). Younger feminists have shifted my understanding. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/29/ rebecca-­solnit-­younger-­feminists-­shift-­understanding-­give-­new-­tools Springgay, S., & Truman, S. (2019). Counterfuturisms and speculative temporalities: Walking research-creation in school. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32(6), 547–559. Strauss, C. (2006). The imaginary. Anthropological Theory, 6(3), 322–344.

References

11

Threadgold, S. (2020). Figures of youth: On the very object of youth studies. Journal of Youth Studies, 23(6), 686–701. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2019.1636014 Thunberg, G. (2019). No one is too small to make a difference. Penguin. Tsing, A. L. (2011). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton University Press. Wallin, J. (2014). Education needs to get a grip on life. In C. Matthew & J. Wallin (Eds.), Deleuze and Guattari, politics and education: For A-people-yet-to-come (pp. 117–139). Wallin, J. J. (2017). Pedagogy at the brink of the post-anthropocene. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(11), 1099–1111. Weinstein, J., & Colebrook, C. (Eds.). (2017). Posthumous life: Theorizing beyond the posthuman. Columbia University Press. Wilkie, A., Savransky, M., & Rosengarten, M. (2017). Speculative research: The lure of possible futures. Routledge. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black Anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press.

Chapter 2

Thinking-Making-Doing Futures Research

This chapter offers a brief overview of some developments in social science research-­ related to posthumanism, post-qualitative, and futures-making research practices that were influential in the shaping of the research included in this book. It outlines the broad methodological principles, processes, and means of analysis that were set to work. In particular, it notes the ways in which the subjects/objects/events being researched can become study companions alongside texts, theories, and concepts in a diffractive practice of research. The concepts of ‘studying with’ and ‘meanwhiles’ are considered for their usefulness to research enterprises in the current epoch. An attitude – a means of orientation – a multidimensional compass, to help us find our way beyond the confines of ‘how it is,’ and seek out new ways of being in directions not only northwards and upwards but outwards, inwards, and in dimensions not yet within our imagination.... Nick Sousanis (2015, 46).

The methodological orientation and ‘in-field’ practices that have contributed to the making of this text are influenced by a series of developments that are now well documented in research literature across various domains: discussions around futures-making as integral to research; matters arising from post-qualitative, non-­ representational methodologies; and of course, predominant posthumanist sensibilities, all converging at the Anthropocene and the demands it poses. This scholarship spans the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, with the subfields such as futures studies, educational futures, futures anthropologies, and speculative research supplying most inspiration as they seem to grasp the urgency to be methodologically creative. A brief recap of some key elements of these developments is offered here as a way of illustrating the methodological frame that contributed to the making of this book.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 E. Priyadharshini, Pedagogies for the Post-Anthropocene, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5788-7_2

13

14

2  Thinking-Making-Doing Futures Research

2.1  Posthumanism at the Anthropocene At a time when a whole geological epoch becomes comprehensible as the effect/ result of cumulative human effect, posthumanism’s disavowal of human exceptionalism is both an appropriate critique and a potential way out of the crisis. Viewing the current epoch as the geological imprint caused by human thought and action against other humans, life forms, and matter – colonialisms, chattel slavery, extractive carbon-fuelled economics, and associated lifestyles – impels us to seek alternatives that diminish the ‘Anthro’ of the Anthropocene. The epoch calls for us to be ontologically inventive and methodologically innovative. Questioning afresh what constitutes the ‘human’ or the ‘social’ poses fundamental, challenging questions about how we conceptualise the world and our disciplines. It also prises open established research habits and traditions to question how we come to see and comprehend. At a time when bodies, not just of humans, are increasingly understood as ‘breaking into one another’, ‘conjoined in our fates’, and ‘suffering from the ills of other species’ (Tsing et al., 2017), it is no longer ethical nor intellectually satisfactory to continue to centre the idea of an autonomous, rational, undivided human as the unit of reference, the subject/object of our undivided attention. Hildyard, a historian of science, writes of how hard it is to understand and to reconcile with our multiple existences, particularly the presence and impact of what she calls our ‘second body’. The first body is the one we know intimately and recognise readily. But she insists that there exists a second one, a literal, physical, biological existence, not a conceptual-literary creation. The condition of existence in the Anthropocene means that human bodies exist at several levels: Your first body could be sitting alone in a church in the centre of Marseille, but your second body is floating above a pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of the city, it is inside a freight container in the docks, and it is also thousands of miles away, on a flood plain in Bangladesh, in another man’s lungs. It is understandably difficult to remember that you have anything to do with this second body  – your first body is the body you inhabit in your daily life. However, you are alive in both. You have two bodies. (2017, 25)

These words encapsulate the challenge of research today – we must account for the entanglement of both/many of our bodies that exist at scales beyond our sight, beyond our language capacity, and beyond our perceived feelings or experience. Such an understanding from outside realist frameworks is naturally difficult to acquire when so much of our research practice is still rooted in and valued for, staying within this frame. But the rewards of doing this lie in the revelation of worlds that have been ignored or damaged by modernist tools of knowledge-making (Tsing et al., 2017). An immediate challenge for educational researchers is in understanding what might now drive our work. Where previously following a pupil, a student, or even a curriculum or policy-centred agenda felt right, shifting to a posthuman perspective throws up no clear pre-identifiable object-subject of focus. Most often we have followed humanist agendas and focused on tangible (through language-based observation, interview, etc.) and measurable phenomena. However, emerging work,

2.1  Posthumanism at the Anthropocene

15

particularly in the early years subfield, has shown the possibilities and potential of moving beyond human-centred research. Scholars in this field have fruitfully exploited outdoor learning opportunities to understand the entanglements of children and nature (Nxumalo & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2018; and others inspired by the common worlds research collective1), going on to question the ontological separations of ‘human’ and ‘nature’. Such work shows us why it is important to study education and learning from non-anthropocentric, posthuman frameworks and how it is possible to do so. In this book I start from the perspective of apparently human subjects – youth – but am led to examine ways in which they are not yet, and perhaps never fully, admitted into the category of human. There is always the risk of unwittingly bringing back vestiges of humanism and reinstating the human at the precise point when we understand this as undesirable (Colebrook, 2014). But focusing on their exclusions from adult privileges and their sense of the future at this juncture of the Anthropocene reveals their alienation and their productive energies in critiquing the present, thus opening up the category of human in new ways and also opening new avenues for educational research. A similar reconceptualising of our customs, practices, and disciplinary boundaries is being undertaken in innovative ways by other researchers. For instance, Ulmer (2017) offers a clear example of how the contaminated water crisis in Flint, Michigan, brings home the reality of the Anthropocene and how it can combine with a posthuman approach to focus beyond traditional concerns (of say student attainment in tests, studied through classroom observations or interviews) to include context, events, affects, effects, relations, and so on – in other words, educational studies in Flint (or anywhere) can now have to be recognised as inseparable from the ecological crisis of the wider epoch. Disciplinary preoccupations stand exposed as insular, even petty, when they ignore or refuse to attend to the wonders and terrors of more-than-human assemblages. The unit of educational enquiry can no longer just be the human student in isolation, but as an element of their multitudinous environment, as part of their ecology constituted by objects, chemicals, geographical features, political events, institutions, animals, and materials. Such a reorientation can upset traditions of rational individualisation that helped create the distinctions between human and non-human, nature and culture, art and science, and indigenous/vernacular and modern. They can help make our enquiries less parochial and more post-disciplinary.

 https://commonworlds.net/

1

16

2  Thinking-Making-Doing Futures Research

2.2  Post-qualitative Research Inspiring post-qualitative experiments in research have emerged in response to the concerns of posthumanism. This period of ‘agitation’ in the academic sphere has had a wide-ranging impact on the practices that used to sit under the qualitative research umbrella (Springgay & Truman, 2018). The various ‘turns’ in social theory – speculative, affective, posthuman, ontological, etc. – have led to the questioning of what previously counted as data, evidence, rigour, analysis, ethics, and representation (Koro-Ljunberg et  al., 2018; Lather, 2016; MacLure, 2015, 2016, 2017; St. Pierre, 2019). They can be described as attempts to escape unsatisfactory or inadequate methodological orientations, such as a preoccupation with representation, rigour, or accuracy embedded in prescriptive methods. As such, there is no set design/process to follow, no appropriate ‘methods’ to collect the correct ‘data’. The very idea of data collection is rendered problematic as data cannot be thought outside lives, contexts, and environments. There is no process of analysis that can offer ‘results’ and no way of separating this collection/analysis/representation from a ‘real’ world that exists outside of the research (St. Pierre, 2019). Instead, the relationship with data is re-oriented to pay attention to moments of wonder, curiosity, horror, or other pleasant or uncomfortable affect, particularly, those moments when data (and participants) exceed the frames offered by research convention (MacLure, 2013a, b). Vannini (2015, 15) describes this as a process to ‘enliven rather than report, to render rather than represent, to resonate rather than validate, to rupture and reimagine rather than to faithfully describe’. Moving away from validity, reflexivity, or representativeness, the goals of this mode of research are broadly experimentation and the creation of the ‘new’. Being non-derivative and aspiring for a different, even ‘wild’ conceptuality (Thrift, 2008) is central to this mode. One of the challenges identified is to go beyond the pattern-detecting, representativeness-­seeking, coding, and categorising processes that are often about the mastery of the researcher and their ability to control data and its explosion of meanings into manageable, representable, themes. They emphasise sensibilities of attunement (Sheridan et  al., 2020; Brigstocke & Noorani, 2016) and diffractive practices (Barad, 2017; Lenz-Taguchi, 2012; Mazzei, 2014) that include ‘thinking with’ or ‘reading into’ theory, objects, things, places, and events (Ulmer, 2017). Such practices move us away from looking for sameness that established analytic practices (of coding or thematising, for instance) offer to ways of dispersing meaning to generate new insights that would not otherwise come to light. These developments have emerged in response to/in conjunction with the ecological, material, sensory, and affective turns that have come to characterise post-­ qualitative research in the quest to seek new configurations and patterns rather than mine for meaning. They are meant to generate newness, new ways of thinking, feeling, sensing, perceiving, communicating, etc. which no longer stop with critique, but move on to experimentation and creation. Much of this experimentation has been generative, and the resulting ethos of ‘thinking-doing-making’ as a joint

2.3  Futures-Making Research

17

act of research has offered new opportunity to analyse and re-think everyday research practices.

2.3  Futures-Making Research Scholarship in the futures and speculative research fields also urge a break away from old logics, rationalities, and habits, to develop new ones that attend, invent, and experiment (Savransky et al., 2017; Salazar et al., 2017). Here, the purpose is more explicitly to attempt to shape the ‘yet-to-come’ differently to the ‘already’. Futures are conceived, not as objects of knowledge but are ‘vectors of risk and creative experimentation’ (Savranksy et al., 2017, 5). The future’s capacity to ‘lure’ us to experiment with the sensibilities and constraints of our research practices is seen as an invitation to be grasped and exploited. Such a speculative orientation is different from the speculation associated with hypercapitalism, say, in futures financial markets or in the algorithmic logic of digital technology where the ‘shadow of probabilities’ is rooted in the present (Savranksy et al., 2017, 6) and where extrapolation and prediction to maximise profits define success. By contrast, in futures social research, there is a Deleuzian attempt to ‘struggle’ against existing probabilities so as to affirm the promise of the unexpected, which even against all odds can transform the probable. Hence we are asked to be conscious of the sense of the future that we inevitably evoke within any research enterprise. If the Anthropocene must be made as short/thin as possible, then research must be operationalised in a way that opens up the possibilities for different futures. Another goal of the speculative research process that neatly meets the mood of the Anthropocene is that of intervening to ‘shift the intensities with which a future may be felt’ (Savranksy et al., 2017, 12). Interventionist approaches rely on cultivating a critical anticipatory stance to the future, moving away from descriptive or reactionary responses. To be clear, speculative approaches set for themselves, the task of encouraging the articulation of imaginative propositions and desirable future landscapes; they try not just to mirror the realities they are confronted with but to sow the seeds of new futures. Such research is less preoccupied with truth-making and becomes more of a cultural contribution to life (Gregen, 2014; Hickey, 2016). To meet such tall orders, Savransky et al. (2017) suggest that researchers cultivate a sensibility marked by eruptions of the (im)possible events that cannot be anticipated and open futures that cannot be managed in advance – in other words, we are asked to become experts in ‘not knowing’. This prioritises dispositions of vulnerability and humility from researchers whose purpose is primarily not to foreclose on the unknown potentialities of futures. Notions of the researcher as humble/vulnerable have been previously articulated, most notably in feminist, de-colonising, and participatory methodologies. In the version of participatory research inflected by posthumanism, there are questions about who/what might be recognised as ‘partners’ or ‘participants’ and how we might develop sensibilities to become attuned to agencies and desires expressed by

18

2  Thinking-Making-Doing Futures Research

the multitude of elements, human and otherwise, which comprise a research event. This may still be participatory research of the kind that amplifies minoritarian perspectives, but focused on non-anthropocentic agendas. Futures research adds even more complexity to this situation, as future-making is unlikely to be a smooth or uncontested process. The intervention and experimentation sought by futures-­ making research must thus be tempered by the demands for humility and vulnerability. By and large, the sorts of futures-making advocated by these Deleuzian methodologies tend to be driven by social justice priorities, that is, they attempt to break away from modernist, capitalist, colonial teleologies and move towards posthuman, post-Anthropocene ones. They still seek to encourage agency or resilience in the face of uncertainty and precariousness (Facer et al., 2011) but in ways that retain the critical awareness of local and planetary predicaments. While posthumanist, post-qualitative, and speculative orientations to research may have much in common, the practice of research from these perspectives, from within established institutions and disciplines, always poses challenges. Researching the imaginaries of the future and their relation to education and youth stretched every traditional notion and practice of social science research I may have started with. Here, ideas of ‘study’ (Harney & Moten, 2013) and paying attention to ‘meanwhiles’ (Guyotte et al., 2020) proved to be useful concepts to return to, when feeling rudderless. ‘Studying with’ offered an attitude to researching that sat more harmoniously with the developments outlined earlier, and ‘meanwhiles’ helped remind me of the usefulness of distractions/diffractions in the research process that led to experiments, inventions, and creations.

2.4  Studying With The idea of ‘thinking with’ or ‘reading with’ is usually discussed as part of a set of diffractive practices of analysis, replacing approaches such coding/categorising/thematising that seek and reinforce sameness rather than enact intervention, invention, and newness (Lenz-Taguchi, 2012). Another version of this is articulated as ‘study’ by Harney and Moten (2013) who perceive a difference between ‘study’ and ‘learning’, where learning emerges as more closely associated with a neoliberal, consumer model that permeates education today. Learning is linked to everyday institutional practices such as earning credits, meeting learning objectives, and demonstrating the achieving of pre-set learning outcomes. To move away from the inertia of established institutionalised ideas of research, Harney and Moten advance a call to ‘study’, i.e., to devote oneself to enquiry and curiosity that starts from the neglected practices of everyday life. They understand everyday acts such as working, dancing, suffering, and playing music, as modes of activity which include study – a way of ‘working with’ others. To them, paying attention to this kind of working-with allows access to alternative histories of thought beyond what is canonised as desirable or appropriate in institutions. This kind of attention to relations in

2.4  Studying With

19

the world is meant to allow everyone to be involved in ‘study’, to be a student, and I would add, to be a study companion. It is the halting, unsure, not-fully-knowing way we feel as researcher-students, within a process replete with dead ends, circular discussions, and belated understandings that is the method. Jack Halberstam, in his introduction to Harney and Moten’s book, links this method of studying with anticipating futures: …we prepare now for what will come by entering into study. Study, a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you, prepares us to be embedded in what Harney calls ‘the with and for’…. (Harney & Moten, 2013, 11)

Here, the study companions are not just theorists or ideas with which to think, but also the moments of everyday life, expanded to include non-humans, events, and phenomena. In an interview with Shikaitis, Harney explains their idea of study in a way that chimes with the needs of the epoch: I’ve been thinking more and more of study as something not where everybody dissolves into the student, but where people sort of take turns doing things for each other or for the others, and where you allow yourself to be possessed by others as they do something. That also is a kind of dispossession of what you might otherwise have been holding onto, and that possession is released in a certain way voluntarily, and then some other possession occurs by others. … being possessed by the dispossessed, and offering up possession through dispossession, is such an experiment and is, among other things, a way to think of love, and this too can arise in study. (Harney & Moten, 2013, 109)

There have been several companions with whom I have been studying in the writing of this book – young people in schools who were part of more traditionally conceived, if not always executed fieldwork, school climate strikers demonstrating in the streets, the hand-made placards they displayed, youth survey data from national and global research firms, Afrofuturistic novels and their authors’ desires, and of course, academic and popular scholarship from the past and present. They were all part and parcel of the thinking-making-doing process, only a small part of which can be presented in text. They each had information, truths, knowledges, and lessons to impart, and they were all ‘teachers’ in this sense. Shape-shifting from what seems like ‘data’ in one register to ‘teacher’ and ‘co-student’ in another I hope has undone any extractive orientation that may have been embedded in this project. Engaging with a range of disparate material as a mode of study, as a student, also reveals a certain dispossession in the process and how impossible it may be to feel a sense of authority or control over the materials or their meanings. There is also little possibility of remaining unchanged and unchallenged when the experimentation in research is also an experimentation of self – attuning oneself to seeing differently, sensing differently. This not only expands the worlds we study, it expands us, makes us ‘become with’, and perhaps makes us ‘more than’ institutionally recognised experts. It has been argued that a different, more engaged and insightful form of research is possible if researchers hear, see, and feel for/about/with their subjects/data, in sensory and affective ways (Pink, 2015; Knudsen & Stage, 2015). Simultaneously

20

2  Thinking-Making-Doing Futures Research

studying with different kinds of materials, events, and experiences gathered at local and global levels alerts us to different shifts in affective and sensory engagements. We are called to be alert to not just the senses/emotions that arise in encounters but also to how they move, shape, impel, and orient us in new ways (Ahmed, 2004, 2006, 2014). As the study progresses, we register a change in how we sense/feel our companions as well as ourselves. When a snippet from a conversation with a child/ student finds an echo in global surveys, or world events, moving across the scales to understand the connections can potentially deepen our engagement with the empirical in ways that recognises patterns and narratives but does not reduce difference. Being moved between these scalar boundaries of individual and social or global allows new and different insights to be examined. More specifically, studying with the broad demographic category of ‘youth’ changes how we ‘feel’ the future. There is a greater poignancy and urgency, and ‘youth’ in all its diversity becomes a device that lends a unique charge to the study of futures. Threadgold (2020) warns of the dangers of a lazy use of this ‘heuristic device’, when a range of different orientations to diverse youth can be lumped together, even promoting orthodoxy and stereotyping of the category. In this book I attempt to study with youth in a number of ways. Young people’s (largely between 15 and 25 years) perspectives, pronouncements, actions, and demands in relation to their planetary futures are examined. This material is drawn from different scales and domains, from the micro, private, or local domains (individual interviews, conversations, encounters, observations, and group discussions in specific sites) to the macro and public domains (global and national surveys with youth; published speeches and photographic images in the public domain). I also draw on the cultural domain of speculative fiction which youth re-purpose in their imaginaries (zombie fiction), as well as terrains of Afrofuturistic fiction that rely on youthful protagonists to chart utopian imaginaries of the future. This way of engaging with ‘youth’ and the qualities and conditions of youth allows for new understandings on what might be held in common – a youthful sense of imagining and anticipating the future that is productive in studying/thinking about futures. This assembly of ‘studying with’ moments held together by the threads of youth, futures, and education is an expansion of more traditional educational research approaches. Enacting a multi or trans-disciplinary approach to this enquiry felt necessary to accommodate the inclusion of the cultural and political terrains that are often the subject of future imaginaries. These terrains elicit youth’s affect and agency in very different and perhaps more vibrant ways than enquiries rooted in institutional sites of education. Including speculative fiction involving youth protagonists as a study companion was an attempt to widen the scope of educational research to engage with aspects that speak more directly to youth interests and concerns about the future. The creating of better futures is a utopian project and utopia’s function, according to Miguel Abensour is the education of desire, that is, to learn to desire better, in new and different ways (Nadir, 2010). This must also mean that research itself could be a process that encourages us to ‘desire in a different way’. This too feels unfamiliar, another tall order, but then all tasks associated with shortening the Anthropocene

2.4  Studying With

21

inevitably are. One of the ways I attempted this was to focus away from what may be apparent as institutionally approved desires – such as getting good grades for instance. This power of bureaucratic institutions has been discussed by Wallin (2014), drawing on Guattari (2009), as one of infantilising desires (of both student and teacher). These scholars suggest that we look for ‘lines of flight’, moments when the subjects escape or resist majoritarian, institutional forces. I started with cultural practices that brought students pleasure/joy, which encapsulated their most desired states, which led to conversations around speculative, particularly dystopian fiction genres. While the cultural field emerges as important to youth audiences, it is also an interest that is often ignored as it is seen as beyond the ‘proper’ remit of formal educational institutions. Here was room to start elsewhere. Speculative fiction also eases conversations about the future which are notoriously difficult to start or sustain in a meaningful way. Setting up an environment in which young people can imagine and articulate a range of futures is intrinsically challenging. Firstly, asking young people to share their hopes, dreams, fears, and anxieties has an invasive quality (Lyon & Carabelli, 2016). The ethics of this encounter demands that anyone who volunteers does so without feeling coerced and feels able to withdraw their participation at any time. Any young people who volunteered were reminded of this at each encounter. There were no withdrawals, but the numbers remained small. Secondly, Bateman (2014) has observed how demands to talk about futures can have a ‘paralysing’ effect on young people. This might well be the case for not so young people too, but the fact that research is often conducted in institutional spaces which exude an expectation of realist research, i.e. of all participants behaving reasonably predictability, talking in a plausible register might pose a particular problem for young participants. The future is after all unpredictable and one’s future self is a speculative fiction at any point but acknowledging this in such a space is difficult and can feel unhelpfully transgressive. The kind of speculative, looking into the unknown future kind of research, requires researchers to work to alter the weight of these expectations. They themselves need to depart from traditional roles of directing or guiding young people from a position of knowledge and authority. We have knowledge of how adults’ views of the future can overdetermine young people’s futures talk (Bateman, 2014), and there was a concerted effort during periods of fieldwork, to create an environment where participants would feel able to articulate any issues of import to them, including contrafactual futures, i.e. futures not easily imaginable by adults, and even those that might ‘distort, confound or transcend those of adults’ (Gough, 1990, 308). As has been documented in detail, schools are spaces where certain regimes of anticipation are recognised and others seen as trivial or perhaps pass by unseen. By encouraging young people to set the terms of the conversation, starting from their favourite youth culture-related engagements (sport, books, music, movies, tv series, games), there was a deliberate attempt to start at a place that young people relished. The (volunteer) participants who seemed initially bemused by the opportunity to speculate freely commented how such topics of conversation were a rare occurrence in the formal space of institutions. These encounters were initially guided by my curiosity about their conceptions and formulations of futures but were

22

2  Thinking-Making-Doing Futures Research

soon overshadowed by the quality of their ‘alienness’ in the worlds of school and beyond. At first, somewhat subconsciously and later with more awareness, my relations with young people – whether in person or in snippets of survey data, in photo images, in delivered speeches, or later in their fictionalised forms in sci-fi and fantasy literature – were shaped by their difference and distance from institutional and majoritarian discourse on the variety of topics and themes that emerged as relevant to them. To begin with, a range of affective and anticipatory methods (Sardar, 2013), including activities and workshop style techniques (scenario construction, photo elicitations, speculative timelines, word associations, idea generation, etc.), were put to use alongside more traditional interview-conversations and group discussions. No school teachers or authority figures were present during the activities. My hopes for these encounters were to remain alert to what has been called an ‘eventful sensibility’ to temporality, ‘a time marked by the unexpected eruptions of the (im) possible, of social, political, economic, philosophical and ecological events that cannot be anticipated and open up possible futures that cannot be managed in advance’ (Savransky et al., 2017, 7). The need to do this was not simply rooted in an oppositional or perverse inclination (fuelled by my interest in their alienness) but also by a desire for the kind of ‘deep empiricism’ that seeks to establish/accumulate more than isolated facts, as well as their relations and forms of togetherness (Savranksy et al., 2017, 10). It became apparent that looking for ‘eruptions of the impossible’ is also guided by a curiosity about why some matters become more intelligible in institutional spaces and others more prone to dismissal and how arguments are marshalled to justify the intelligibility or dismissal of certain utterances. In the social sciences we have tended to value research that is designed on deductive logic, to draw on a sample and thus speak to the concerns of larger populations. Such research can claim to be empirically located in the social. But subjects/objects may also be used in a variety of their ways – as sounding boards to test an idea, as sources of inspiration to set in train a new argument, as willing co-students in speculative ‘what if’ thought-experiments, as theoretical consoles (Carrington, 2018), and so on. They may not necessarily yield data that when clustered together represent the views of a wider population. But this is less important than their presence as random, unique, or mundane members who may have some connection to the social issue/problem under enquiry. The unit of ‘data’ they yield is not valuable only if it is echoed by large numbers of their group; it may be valuable because they may be an ‘outlier’ or present as an ideal co-student. In other words, their inner lives, opinions, and experiences are valuable not because they can be aggregated to make a voluble claim (analysing for sameness), but because they may be useful as one of many granular ‘dots’ that can be joined up to make new and different senses of the world. These dots/nodes can illuminate and appreciate new constellations that were never attended to before. Such an approach pays attention to more than repeating patterns in the social sphere, it ‘also affirms the existence of… novel and unexpected events that, against all odds, transform the very order of the possible, the probable and plausible’ (Wilkie et al., 2017, 7), which is an integral goal of futures-­ making research.

2.5  Speculative Narratives

23

A separate challenge is that of unpacking and interpreting words and experiences without ‘flattening’ them into pre-existing frameworks. Researchers who use a mix of traditional and innovative methods still wrestle with the unresolved challenges of analysis and representation (Ivinson & Renold, 2013; Lyon & Carabelli, 2016). The chapter on apocalypse, for instance, takes its cue from attempts at listening to the monstrous (Weinstock, 2017), that is, to not just look for relevance to the research issue, which is often our primary orientation, but to also listen to the ways in which horror/the horrific is articulated. This requires paying attention to the ‘howls, growls and screams’, to the rage and fury and fear and frustration that is embedded between, within, and around the words of an encounter. It also is much less concerned about the source/influence ‘behind’ orientations to the future. Neither were young people’s narratives subject to examination to detect what may lie ‘under’ or ‘beyond’ the surface of what was conveyed, particularly so when this was about futures that are not normally at home in institutional discourses, and therefore a form of critique in themselves. It is important to clarify that this was not about eliciting and valuing only the unconventional in participants – which would be an unbearable burden to place on subjects – but more about opening up existing conventions of research to experimentation in keeping with the developments in posthuman, decolonising, and futures literatures. Here it meant that the ‘data’ was used in a conversation with theories and ideas that resonated with participant conceptions of the future. For instance, discussions on ‘the speculative’, ‘dystopia’, or ‘horror’ span many subject disciplines, genres, and orientations, but the ones used here are drawn from popular culture and literary commentary – genres that repeatedly surfaced in young people’s talk. This also allowed a consideration of moments when the participant narratives diverged from established commentary and analysis. In turn, speculative fiction itself became an object/genre to study with.

2.5  Speculative Narratives Experimenting with attuning ourselves to different ways of seeing – as with a dog’s senses – expands our world to reveal unanticipated depths, crinkly spaces awaiting exploration… To ask ‘what if’ in a speculative mode. Just as we now recognise that verbal or sensory realms may each reveal different insights about phenomena, we seek imaginary and speculative modes that can add to, and work with, empirical ones. Each reveals the boundaries of the other, the limitations that restrict our understanding about the world, and reveal those ‘crinkly spaces awaiting exploration’. A crinkle in time. (Sousanis, 2015, 44–49)

Speculative fiction is a globally successful genre, popular with young adult audiences but stretching well beyond them too. They encompass ever-expanding subgenres (comics, sci-fi, cli-fi, Afrofuturism, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, fairy tale, horror, gothic, etc.) and stretch across mediums (literature, movies, tele-series, gaming, etc.). They operate on the ‘what if’ supposition: ‘what if x comes to or had come to pass?’ Marvel’s ‘what if’ series and DC Comic’s ‘Elseworlds’ are comic

24

2  Thinking-Making-Doing Futures Research

book universes exploring this idea. Marvel’s ‘what if’ series started in 1977, narrated by Uatu the Watcher, and is an exploration of what worlds might form if characters made different decisions. DC’s ‘Elseworlds’ has run since the early days of Superman in the 1940s. The first full title of Elseworlds is ‘Gotham by Gaslight’, a 1989 comic about what would happen if Batman was a Victorian Sherlock Holmes hunting Jack the Ripper. Other popular runs include ‘Red Son’, a 2003 comic about what would happen if Superman landed in Soviet Russia and not in Kansas.2 Although this ‘what if’ literature has a long history, it suits a current mood that seeks ways of addressing personal feelings and social experiences that are unprecedented, new, or even overwhelming. Realist narratives drawing on presumed audience experiences of the past or on the inner lives of individuals and familiar contexts are no longer satisfactory at this juncture. The new normal of pandemics, climate change, or resurgent racism/populism exceeds the capacity of old realist registers to adequately account for this rapidly evolving world. There is therefore a conscious attempt with speculative fiction not to coincide with the ‘real’ and the ‘already’. Cultural commentators have noted that this allows a break from realist approaches, making room for inventive aspects (Michael, 2018). Speculative narratives are able to consider rapidly changing contexts and improbable occurrences in a dramatic manner that realist narratives wedded to the ordinary, to probabilistic patterns, and the predictable, cannot. Their aesthetic of ‘cognitive estrangement’ (Suvin, 1979) allows us to review the world and think afresh. In addition, the new inventions/fabulations of speculative narratives can allow for a new or different kind of interrogation of what it means to be human and humane and to engage with posthumanism (Bradley, 2017) in a way that reflects current social concerns. In a rather obvious way, speculative fiction appears to be a rich curricular resource for education in this current juncture. Its potential for illustrating posthumanism, events, and relationalities beyond orthodox constructions has been noted, and its potential for future-making research, including developing new ontological sensibilities, has also been illustrated (Rousell et al., 2017; de Freitas & Truman, 2021). My particular interest in them is in their wider presence in the realm of popular culture, where they work as part of an assembly, alongside empirical or sensory material to allow us a different and entertaining way of making sense of emerging phenomena and offer windows into future worlds. They are also intellectually demanding texts because they use coherent logic for the narrative to make sense, and yet the reader must make huge imaginative leaps into unknown worlds and stretch their minds beyond the habitual and accepted. In this way, the stories can instigate us to think beyond ways sanctioned by hegemonic institutions and ideologies (Moylan, 2000). Unsurprisingly, social science scholarship (cf. Danowski & Viveiros de Castro, 2016; Yusoff, 2018) has turned to the realms of Science Fiction Fantasy (SFF) for conceptual resources adequate to Anthropocene threats (Jensen,

2  Special thanks to Harry Dyer for introducing me to this world and its relevance to the preoccupations of futures studies.

2.6 Meanwhiles

25

2020), with climate fiction (cli-fi) in particular proving to be a rich resource that experiments with virtual consequences, paths to alternative futures, and offers exemplars of possible institutional and social responses. In other words, they stimulate our imagination to work beyond the current and the real. In this book, they are recognised as a vital resource to instigate novel ways of imagining futures and as a rich pedagogical source for shortening this epoch. As such they also make excellent study companions.

2.6  Meanwhiles Research begins in the middle. …The middle is not an average nor a zone between the beginning and the end. …In the middle, immanent modes of thinking-making-doing come from within the processes themselves, not from outside them. In the middle the speculative “what if” emerges as a catalyst for the event. The middle is a difficult place to be…. That is the point. The middle can’t be known in advance of research. You have to be “in it,” situated and responsive. You are not there to report on what you find or what you seek, but to activate thought. To agitate it. Springgay and Truman (2018, 206)

In the process of studying with someone, something, an idea, or an event, disruptive knowledges are generated. There are many ways in which these ‘meanwhile’ moments are disruptive, but chiefly for me, they were often disruptive simply by being distracting. They diverted me from hopeful plans or goals or eagerly anticipated endings. The meanwhile moments are characterised by simultaneity; they happened alongside other episodes and were off shoots of what seemed to be the ‘main’ event. However, following them also meant that productive spaces were to be found in many different, unanticipated areas. Following the ideas of Guyotte et al. (2020) and Braidotti (2013), I pause on a couple of these generative ‘meanwhiles’ that were directly produced by the intra-actions of studying with. Researching from the middle meant that I was being ‘taught’ by the beings/objects/ events I was studying with, turning it into a thinking-making-doing process. Everyday practices begin to look less innocuous; models and frameworks begin to be less satisfactory and, in a couple of cases, compelled me to generate new alternatives. They were the product of disruptive entanglements and I present two such examples of the generative potential of meanwhile moments in the next two parts of the book. The first seeks to generate different kinds of CVs (or resumes) for/with young people inspired by the apocalyptic imaginary of a research participant (at the end of the chapter on Apocalypse), and the second uses a prominent framework for understanding different models of childhood to draw up a framework for models of adulthood from the perspective of youth operating with a revolutionary imaginary (at the end of the chapter on Revolution). The methodological importance of paying attention to the ‘meanwhile’ is perhaps to take seriously the nonlinearity of thinking and writing during research and the disruptive power of discontinuity to create multiple possibilities. These can help

26

2  Thinking-Making-Doing Futures Research

to extricate ourselves from the “inertia of everyday routines” (Braidotti, 2011, 90) that characterise the many fields of education. In this chapter, I have tried to set out the major influences  – posthumanism, futures scholarship, and post-qualitative developments – as well as the sources of material and data and the practical decisions and reasons for inclusion in this book. In doing this, I hope I have not just nodded to requirements of rigour or originality but posed further questions around whether and how we might redefine or expand these qualities in research and scholarship production to suit the urgent challenges (of shortening the Anthropocene, for example) we choose to address.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). Collective feelings: Or, the impressions left by others. Theory, Culture and Society, 21(2), 25–42. Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2014). Cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press. Barad, K. (2017). Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: Re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable. New Formations, 92(92), 56–86. Bateman, D. (2014). Untangling teachers’ images of their futures through their responses to the futures narratives of children. Journal of Futures Studies, 18(3), 41–56. Bradley, J. (2017, February 21). Writing on the precipice. Sydney Review of Books. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/writing-­on-­the-­precipice-­climate-­change/ Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory (2nd ed.). Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity Press. Brigstocke, J., & Noorani, T. (2016). Posthuman attunements: Aesthetics, authority and the arts of creative listening. GeoHumanities, 2(1), 1–7. Carrington, V. (2018). The changing landscape of literacies: Big data and algorithms. Digital Culture and Education, 10(1), 67–76. Colebrook, C. (2014). Death of the post-human: Essays on extinction (Vol 1). Open Humanities Press. Danowski, D., & Viveiros de Castro, E. (2016). The ends of the worlds. Polity Press. de Freitas, E., & Truman, S. (2021). New empiricisms in the Anthropocene: Thinking with speculative fiction about science and social inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(5), 522–533. Facer, K., Craft, A., Jewitt, C., Mauger, S., Sandford, R., & Sharples, M. (2011). Building Agency in the Face of Uncertainty: A thinking tool for educators and education leaders. http://richardsandford.net/edfutures/wp-­content/uploads/2011/06/Building-­Agency-­in-­the-­Face-­of-­ Uncertainty-­Thinking-­Tool.pdf Gough, N. (1990). Futures in Australian education – Tacit, token and taken for granted. Futures, 22(3), 298–310. Gregen, K. (2014). From mirroring to world-making: Research as future forming. Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour, 45(3). https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12075 Guattari, F. (2009). I am an idea-thief. In S. Lotringer (Ed.), C. Wiener, & E. Wittman (Trans.), Soft subversions: Texts and interviews 1977–1985 (pp. 22–33). Semiotext(e). Guyotte, K.  W., Flint, M.  A., Kidd, B.  G., Potts, C.  A., Irwin, A.  J., & Bennett, L.  A. (2020). Meanwhile: Posthuman intra-actions in/with a post-qualitative readings class. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(1), 109–121. Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. Minor Compositions.

References

27

Hickey, A. (Ed.). (2016). The pedagogies of cultural studies. Routledge. Hildyard, D. (2017). The second body. Fitzcarraldo Editions. Ivinson, G., & Renold, E. (2013). Subjectivity, affect and place: Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs to explore a young girl’s becomings in a post-industrial locale. Subjectivity, 6(4), 369–390. Jensen, C. (2020). Cli-Fi, education, and speculative futures. Comparative Education Review, 64(1), 150–152. https://doi.org/10.1086/707328 Knudsen, B. T., & Stage, C. (2015). Affective methodologies. In Developing cultural research strategies for the study of affect. PalgraveMacmillan. Koro-Ljunberg, M., MacLure, M., & Ulmer, J. (2018). D... a... t... a…, data++, data, and some problematics. In N. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (5th ed., pp. 462–484). SAGE. Lather, P. (2016). Top ten+ list: (Re) thinking ontology in (post) qualitative research. Cultural Studies? Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 125–131. Lenz-Taguchi, H. (2012). A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing interview data. Feminist Theory, 13(3), 265–281. Lyon, D., & Carabelli, G. (2016). Researching young people’s orientations to the future: The methodological challenges of using arts practice. Qualitative Research, 16(4), 430–445. MacLure, M. (2013a). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-­ qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–667. MacLure, M. (2013b). The wonder of data. Cultural Studies? Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 228–232. MacLure, M. (2015). The ‘new materialisms’: A thorn in the flesh of critical qualitative inquiry? https://e-­space.mmu.ac.uk/596897/2/post-­criticalLATEST.pdf MacLure, M. (2016). The refrain of the a-grammatical child: Finding another language in/for qualitative research. Cultural Studies? Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 173–182. MacLure, M. (2017). Qualitative methodology and the new materialisms. In Qualitative inquiry in neoliberal times (pp. 48–58). Routledge. Mazzei, L. A. (2014). Beyond an easy sense: A diffractive analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 742–746. Michael, R. (2018). Friday essay: How speculative fiction gained literary respectability. The Conversation, 1 November 2019. https://theconversation.com/ friday-­essay-­how-­speculative-­fiction-­gained-­literary-­respectability-­102568 Moylan, T. (2000). Scraps of the untainted sky: Science fiction, Utopia, dystopia. Westview Press. Nadir, C. (2010). Utopian studies, environmental literature, and the legacy of an idea: Educating desire in Miguel Abensour and Ursula K. Le Guin. Utopian Studies, 21(1), 24–56. Nxumalo, F., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2017). ‘Staying with the trouble’ in child-insect-educator common worlds. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1414–1426. Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography. Sage. Rousell, D., Cutter-Mackenzie, A., & Foster, J. (2017). Children of an earth to come: Speculative fiction, geophilosophy and climate change education research. Educational Studies, 53(6), 654–669. Salazar, J.  F., Pink, S., Irving, A., & Sjöberg, J. (Eds.). (2017). Anthropologies and futures: Researching emerging and uncertain worlds. Bloomsbury Publishing. Sardar, Z. (2013). Future: All that matters. John Murray. Savransky, M., Wilkie, A., & Rosengarten, M. (2017). The lure of possible futures: On speculative research. In A. Wilkie, M. Savransky, & M. Rosengarten (Eds.), Speculative research: The lure of possible futures (pp. 1–18). Routledge. Sheridan, M. P., Lemieux, A., Do Nascimento, A., & Arnseth, H. C. (2020). Intra-active entanglements: What posthuman and new materialist frameworks can offer the learning sciences. British Journal of Educational Technology, 51(4), 1277–1291. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12928 Sousanis, N. (2015). Unflattening. Harvard University Press.

28

2  Thinking-Making-Doing Futures Research

Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018). On the need for methods beyond proceduralism: Speculative middles,(in) tensions, and response-ability in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(3), 203–214. St. Pierre, E. (2019). Post qualitative inquiry, the refusal of method, and the risk of the new. Qualitative Inquiry, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419863005 Suvin, D. (1979). Metamorphoses of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre. Yale University Press. Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2018). The common worlds of children and animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives. Routledge. Threadgold, S. (2020). Figures of youth: On the very object of youth studies. Journal of Youth Studies, 23(6), 686–701. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2019.1636014 Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. Routledge. Tsing, A. L., Bubandt, N., Gan, E., & Swanson, H. A. (Eds.). (2017). Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press. Ulmer, J. (2017). Posthumanism as research methodology: Inquiry in the Anthropocene. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(9), 832–848. Vannini, P. (Ed.). (2015). Non-representational methodologies: Re-envisioning research. Routledge. Wallin, J. (2014). Education needs to get a grip on life. In C. Matthew & J. Wallin (Eds.), Deleuze and Guattari, politics and education: For a-people-yet-to-come (pp. 117–139). Bloomsbury. Weinstock, J. (2017). Afterword: Howl, growl, scream! Listening to monsters beyond meaning. Listening, 52(3), 199–205. Wilkie, A., Savransky, M., & Rosengarten, M. (2017). Speculative research: The lure of possible futures. Routledge. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black Anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press.

Chapter 3

Part I: Apocalypse

This section of the book has assembled evidence of the apocalyptic imaginary in young people’s contemporary anticipations of the future. Rather than view these visions as an implacable negative that would elicit a reaction of erasing them or rushing too quickly to alleviate them, it proposes a response that acknowledges the underlying critique of this imaginary to better exploit the lessons that it offers. The case for why the apocalyptic imaginary is useful relies on a wide range of disparate sources: scholarly work from the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, youth studies, and education, young adult dystopian literature, and authors’ and artist pronouncements. The sources from which young people’s articulations are drawn are equally miscellaneous: fieldwork data from young people in two UK schools; global and national surveys of youth perceptions of the future; and extracts from the then 16-year-old climate change activist, Greta Thunberg’s speeches. This section thus also attempts to demonstrate how studying with these ‘fragments’ of youth is an enactment of a post-qualitative research process that allows us to make linkages across distinct materials. The aim of this experiment is to explicitly reveal the pedagogies of an apocalyptic imaginary that teaches us to pay attention to the multiple, inter-related concerns of youth, to new ways of engaging with the category of youth (as alien), and to the unacceptable questions about human futurity that this raises. Such lessons have direct implications for how we may breathe new life into everyday practices that are part of young people’s lives and educational experiences.

3.1  The Apocalyptic Imaginary What most people mean when they say “is an end of the world coming?,” … is, “is there an end to the world that we live in right now that we are comfortable in and that we like?” And yeah, that’s going to happen, it happens all the time, it’s called progress or called change… So yes, the end of the world is happening even as we speak. The question becomes whether it’s the kind of world that needs to go. N.K. Jemisin (Hurley & Jemisin, 2018, 477). © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 E. Priyadharshini, Pedagogies for the Post-Anthropocene, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5788-7_3

29

30

3  Part I: Apocalypse

The imaginary of ‘The Apocalypse’, beloved in young adult culture (Harrison, 2019), tends to have a bad reputation in academic circles. It has come to stand for an exhaustion of hope or is dismissed as merely sensationalist. It can appear as a ‘self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myth’ (Haraway, 2016, 35) with notions of an imminent end to the world. The doom-laden, unless-we-act-now imperative that accompanies it is seen as a factor that might actually inhibit ‘a full engagement with our ecological coexistence here on Earth’ (Morton, 2013, 6–7). It is seen as signalling ‘bad teleology’ and tends to a ‘reified meaning in the academic mind’ (Hurley & Sinykin, 2018, 452). But ends can also be seized for breaking away from unsatisfactory pasts and for introducing new beginnings. The classic biblical visions of Daniel and John speak of the apocalypse as the necessary route to the start of a new Kingdom of Heaven. These twin associations of the end, and of the end times as a possibility for new beginnings (Carey, 2019), are central to this imaginary. In apocalyptic fiction, the focus is usually on protagonists surviving the end times for new, more hopeful beginnings. This too has a ring of being much too optimistic, even naïve. Hence, we would be right to be skeptical about the use or usefulness of apocalyptic frames. And yet, for some time now, we have acquired sufficient knowledge of human and animal populations, as well as ecological landscapes that have already been subject to some kind of apocalypse – the brutalities accompanying the first-contact between settlers and indigenous peoples, the unspeakable horrors of slavery, colonialisms, the Holocaust, Hiroshima-Nagasaki, forced migration, etc. The current epoch of the Anthropocene brings us to species extinction, contaminated hellscapes, disappearance of entire ecosystems, and floods and bushfires, all speaking in apocalyptic tones. So it is not surprising that the starkest reasons for why we should not ignore this imaginary are most powerfully articulated by writers and artists from indigenous and black communities that have faced and continue to face a form of ‘apocalypse on the instalment plan’ (Lipsitz, 2006, 145). Cutcha Risling Baldy (2014) analyses and teaches how the California Gold Rush was a zombie apocalypse for California Indians whose very scalps and heads bore a price and were hunted down by remorseless and unreasoning settler-zombies. Lawrence Gross, an Anishinaabe scholar drawing on developments in the field of epigenetics, writes about the post-apocalypse stress syndrome (PASS), whose ‘effect is so profound that the stress can ruin people for the rest of their lives, with the attendant despair and dysfunction being picked up and carried on by subsequent generations’, encoded into their very DNA (2002, 450–451). Writer Rebecca Roanhorse’s (2018) ‘Postcards from the Apocalypse’ is a series of snapshots that reveal how the pursuit of life ‘when the world keeps trying to kill you’ is not just the stuff of speculative fiction, but it is something that indigenous peoples continue to experience in the present. The ending of such worlds, or at least ones in which such conditions make sense, must surely be welcome. The question then is not about ends and beginnings but as Jemisin notes, about what needs to go, and we might add, at what cost and to whom. If these become the defining terms, then the imaginary of the apocalypse begins to yield different ground.

3.1  The Apocalyptic Imaginary

31

Hurley and Sinykin (2018) ask us to recognise that apocalypticism has acquired multiple and contradictory sets of affordances in its long history. It can express a paradoxical desire ‘at once for violence and peace, for the overthrow of empire and its persistence, for individual agency and its loss in the tides of fatalism’ (2018, 454). They advise us to engage with the apocalypse, not as universal and singular but as plural and particular. Asking questions on the specifics of what must go and how draws us to engage with the apocalypse in its material and immediate effects. A popular quote often attributed to Terrance McKenna goes: The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.

Previously I had written a paper with ‘Anticipating the Apocalypse’ in its title (Priyadharshini, 2019). I now have cause to consider with more criticality, the issues raised in that paper. McKenna’s quote makes me ask who the ‘we’ might be. Might that ‘we’ also includes those young who seem so keenly and deeply aware of the apocalyptic (or dystopian) elements of life at local and global levels? Do they feel part of this bubble of privilege or do they see themselves as a bubble trapped within a bubble? What insights do their apocalyptic/dystopian imaginaries offer us? In other words, what sort of pedagogies do their imaginaries of apocalypse and dystopia demonstrate? Although apocalypse and dystopia have crucial differences, in this sect. I treat them jointly mainly because I found youth narratives often switched between these registers and revealed common impulses behind both imaginaries. In popular culture, the apocalypse can be a more spectacular device to rewrite the present and the future, while dystopia tends to have much less of a life and death urgency and paradoxically, much more relentless in how it unravels. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale could be understood as more dystopian and Danny Boyle’s viral zombie pandemic movie, 28 Days Later, more apocalyptic. The temporalities they express feel different but both narrative structures speak of breakdown of the norms undergirding everyday life. Dystopia is also useful in focusing on systemic evils. It reveals the impact of unexamined social systems in everyday lives of people (Moylan, 2000). Dystopia can be the means of depicting alien societies but ‘constitute a warning of what may happen if we go on as we are…’ (Levitas, 2017). Writers of ‘critical dystopias’ (Octavia Butler, for instance) extrapolate and exaggerate present trends to sound the warning and also go on to explore spaces and possibilities to sustain and inspire better futures (Moylan, 2000). By contrast, apocalyptic story lines invariably show the sudden collapse of society/civilization as a means of confronting the cruelty and stupidity of some human impulses, and even the meaninglessness of life. In these imaginings, survival demands unlearnings and new learnings, jettisoning existing norms and ways of living, and making up new modes of being. The possibilities for such transformations may be both individual and social. The apocalypse has also been used to stage encounters between otherwise incomprehensible scales, say, between geological effects and human experience, or

32

3  Part I: Apocalypse

between local, global, and even cosmic scales (an imminent meteor strike). Dystopian and apocalyptic narratives both attend to the breakdown of relationships between humans, and between society and environment. They call into question what it was that led to the break down. As such they are also a portrayal of the failure of humanist ideologies (Harrison, 2019). These impulses are very much part of the apocalyptic imaginaries of young people too and paying attention to them offers us lessons in imagining alternative, post-Anthropocenic futures. I rely on three sources to set out some contemporary exemplars of the apocalyptic/dystopian imaginary, as articulated by young people: fieldwork in two Norwich schools; global/national level surveys of youth perspectives of the future conducted in 2018, 2019, and 2020; and excerpts from 16-year-old Greta Thunberg’s speeches on the climate crisis. These sources speak of different types of apocalypse, articulated at personal, national and planetary scales. No matter what the source, the concerns seem to cut across these scales. It is also worth noting that the young people I encountered in my fieldwork did not subscribe exclusively to any one imaginary for the future. They shifted between them in response to different prospective situations and were capable of arguing from different orientations both within oneself and with each other. Paying attention to the specificities and differences in how the future appears to young people is the intention here. Equally, this calls attention to how adults have tended to respond to such imaginaries. The tendency to worry about and fear young people’s apocalyptic and pessimistic projections of the future is deeply ingrained in adults, particularly those assigned to caring roles such as in education, for very good reasons. I wish to argue that these (adult) fears need to be examined much more self-critically to learn to relate to and become curious about young people’s fears. Eckersley has argued that pessimism among young people can produce ‘cynicism, mistrust, anger, apathy and an approach to life based on instant gratification rather than long-term goals or lasting commitment’ (1999, 88). More recent research (Nordensvard, 2014) supports the view that a pessimistic view of the future cannot be so easily assigned as an unrelenting negative  – the pessimism can illustrate a critical awareness of contemporary life and promote an impetus for change. Nordensvard’s (2014) research with young people in Germany shows a crucial distinction between dystopian and disutopian outlooks: dystopias leave open possibilities for change/betterment while disutopias are more nihilistic in offering no alternative to currently dysfunctional systems. I wish to argue that these imaginaries, whether optimistic or pessimistic, also give rise to different combinations of ‘orientations’ (Bryant & Knight, 2019) to the future  – anticipation, speculation, despair, hope, potentiality, etc. – and do not work in straightforwardly positive or negative ways. Several scholars including Eckersley have argued that society often fails to provide a vision of the future that gives hope to people and that ‘failure to provide a broad cultural framework of hope, meaning and purpose in young people’s lives could be weakening their resilience, making them more vulnerable…’ (1999, 88). While there is an important duty of care to young that is embedded in this view, it also suggests that society/schooling ought to be more normative in shaping future orientations. While hopes and fears (orientations) for the future

3.2  ‘They Never Go There…’

33

influence decision-making in the present (Hicks, 2012); the teleologies of particular orientations are indeterminate (Bryant & Knight, 2019). As I hope to show in the rest of this section, the indeterminate nature of both the affect associated with futures and their teleologies complicates these matters and that, in general, youth are as demanding of honesty as hope from adults. The ‘knowing’ quality of youth, demonstrated in the rest of this section, calls for less normative protectionism, less blind optimism, and more honest interactions and relations. The following section outlines the sorts of areas that young people wish educators and schooling processes would enter and engage.

3.2  ‘They Never Go There…’ There is a striking refrain about the condition of youth today – that there is a widespread ‘poverty of hope’, a sense of hopelessness about the future, particularly compared to older folk and previous generations (Barnardo’s, 2019; Prince’s Trust, 2019; Children’s Society, 2019). There is a claim that there is a qualitative difference, i.e. a worsening of hope even from earlier decades, such as the 1980s or 1990s. Through the 1990s, research from, predominantly, the UK and Australia highlighted young people’s feelings of despair and powerlessness about the future (Eckersley, 1992, 1995, 1998; Hannan et al., 1995; Hicks, 1996; Johnson, 1987; Wilson, 1989). Many young people, then as those today, were concerned about the environment, the economy, and unemployment (Eckersley, 1996; Hannan et al., 1995; Hutchinson, 1992). Eckersley has also noted that children and young people tend to react personally to global threats in apocalyptic frames (1999), which seems to hold true today. However, recent survey findings signalling a rising ‘hopelessness’ among youth are said to outstrip the despair from similar surveys in the past. The Good Childhood Report from the Children’s Society (2019) claims that for 10–15-year-olds, between 2009–2010 and 2016–2017, there was a ‘significant decrease in happiness with life as a whole’, i.e. the score for happiness with ‘Life as a whole’ steadily dropped from 8.17 in 2009–2010 to 7.89 in 2016–2017. Their report contains the disturbing statement: ‘Since 2009 children and young people have become increasingly unhappy. Based on the latest figures we estimate a quarter of a million children are unhappy with their lives, with factors like friends, school and appearance all playing a role’. In the context of a worsening climate crisis, deepening social divides, harsh digital environments, and economic inequalities, it is easier to believe that the ‘hopeless’ sentiments of contemporary young people may not be an anomaly or temporary blip. My own experiences of researching futures with youth reflect many of these concerns but they also offer a more critical look at the fears in ways that speak directly to adult obligations. I first worked with a class of 26 students aged between 16 and 18 years in a Norwich high school, in early 2016. This phase of the study focused on young people’s interests, leisure, and popular cultural activities and perceptions of futures. Most of this information was gathered through an open-ended questionnaire. The aim of the questionnaire was to elicit information on the kinds of

34

3  Part I: Apocalypse

concerns as well as hopes they had about their futures, to help refine the focus for future phases of the research that would flesh out the kinds of changes needed/ desired by young people to help them envision and create preferred futures. The results echo, more or less, other global and national youth surveys published since then. A series of events including organisational restructuring and changing teacher roles led to the second phase being carried out in a neighbouring school with 6 volunteer students (aged between 15–17).1 There, volunteers engaged with a range of activities (scenario construction, word associations, photo elicitations, speculative timelines, postcards from the future), as well as interviews and group discussions spread over different visits across the school year. The results from both phases of the study are interspersed throughout this chapter, along with results from global and national youth surveys. About 70% of the respondents to the school questionnaire claimed their immediate future was at a university, doing higher education. And approximately a quarter (24%) of their responses saw their preferred future involving ‘doing a job I love’, and another quarter (26%) wished for ‘security’ with jobs, homes, and finances. When asked to choose words that best described the future, something of the scale of the problem became more evident. Negative descriptors: degraded, dead, hopeless, doomed, ruined, destroyed, bleak, stuffed, corrupt, conflict, disaster, ‘bleah,’ bad, worse, risky, unstable, less social, global warming. Neutral descriptors: unpredictable, adequate, changing/evolving. Positive descriptors: productive, overcoming, advancing, integrated, helpful, opportunities. Very few questionnaires showed any overlap between these different projections of the future, that is, they tended to opt for either distinctly negative, positive, or neutral descriptors. When asked for reasons why they had chosen the particular descriptors, the answers related to the negative descriptors were the following: too many greedy people, damaged humanity, growing hatred/discrimination, wars/conflicts, Trump, climate change, growing inequality, (anticipated) university costs/student debt, lack of housing, technology will destroy the world, and social Networking will be the death of us. The positive descriptors corresponded to the following: humanity will adapt, fewer tensions, more understanding, big changes that will benefit society, technology. Yet others felt the future was ‘more of the same’ and that there would be ‘no (drastic) change’. The largely negative views on the future have since been echoed, repeatedly, in large-scale youth surveys in the UK.  The children’s charity Barnardo’s survey (2019) of over 1000 people between 16 and 24 years in the UK found that while

1  A segment of the data has been published previously (Priyadharshini, 2019). This chapter adds to this, and expands the argument further.

3.2  ‘They Never Go There…’

35

many young people are hopeful and ambitious for their own futures, they also reflect a wider ‘poverty of hope’ about the future of their generation. Another youth charity, The Prince’s Trust, reported (2019) that their Youth Index Scores collected from a sample of over 2000 16–25-year-olds and have steadily dropped from 73 (out of 100) in 2009 to 69 in 2019. These are scores meant to measure the overall happiness and confidence of young people in the UK. The Barnardo’s survey showed that British young people tended to worry about the future of the NHS (National Health System). They voiced concerns about a mental health crisis, with significant waiting times for specialist services. They saw a lack of diverse job opportunities, particularly vocational options and secure jobs, and a lack of investment in their communities, with too few safe spaces such as youth centres. Notably, they said their school/college curriculum was limited and lacked opportunities to explore their passions. They felt university was too expensive. Young people also reported seeing a rise in crime in their local areas and antisocial behaviour. Long-term concerns raised included a need for increased government action on climate change and the uncertain impact of Brexit. Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds had different concerns from their well-off peers, prioritising employment and crime as their most important issues. These young people also felt significantly less confident in their ability to be socially mobile compared to better off peers. Faced with increasingly similar findings, it is hard to refute this sense of youth pessimism over the future. In the second phase of my own fieldwork, there were more in-depth conversations with young people which presented futures in a much more ambivalent way. One participant Jo summed up her expectations of the future as ‘good, bad, ugly…., all mixed up’, just like her favourite television series ‘Futurama’, which is set in a future that is both ‘funny and dark’. Futurama is an animated sci-fi sitcom set approximately a thousand years in the future, featuring alcoholic robots, one-eyed mutants and decapods. Jo was drawn to the series for its dark humour and its many science and maths gags. Jo described herself as a dancer, and as a student of science and maths, and was single-minded in her desire to teach maths in the future. She said she didn’t have a Plan B as all she wanted was to teach maths. In relation to how school could better support young people in reaching their desired futures, Jo observed that school was only focused on the pragmatics of the present – choosing subjects, revision sessions, gaining better grades, applying for a university place, etc. She added, ‘…but reality is more complicated. They never go there’. This last phrase rankled for a long time after the interview. What was this complicated reality, should educators seek to know more, and how would one open up this space? These led to other questions about young people’s needs in relation to their futures, needs beyond the pragmatics outlined in the interview. The conversations around futures raised again and again, the richness and variety of young people’s conceptualisations of life and reality that otherwise remain invisible, sanctioned by the instrumental nature of adult-youth, school-pupil relations. They also attested to the lack of attunement and attention to ‘non-pragmatic’ matters that characterises our interactions in institutional contexts.

36

3  Part I: Apocalypse

A similar understanding of the future as complex was echoed by Faith, who was interested in pursuing a career in pharmacy. Her prediction was that advances in medicine would be ‘massive’, but this could be equally ‘good or bad’. It was clear that the word ‘advances’ was not used to connote an entirely positive development and reflected a scepticism about ‘progress’ being an unadulterated good. Her understanding was that the future was charged with such unpredictability that it would ‘lack control and direction’. But her biggest fears were about potential conflict arising from ‘extremism and conflict in human populations and societies’. These were not described as full-blown wars between countries, but more in the nature of divisions within societies. Stark inequalities were attributed to the growth of these divisions. Max who hoped for a career in health care seemed more attuned to current inequalities in accessing health care. She spoke at length about a documentary she had watched on ‘appalling’ mental health services about a young girl who had to be separated from her family because there was no provision near where she lived. If such trends persisted, they would lead to a further ‘segregation of people’ along lines of cultural values, material wealth, and health. There was always hope, but tempered by an assumption about the limits to human goodness: …may be people will learn to be more accepting of others than they are now. For example, in my parent’s generation, there was even more blatant racism and homophobia. But there has been a lot of progress and maybe things will be better. That’s what we want. … At the individual level, people may not change. Big things, like energy sources may change and become more eco-friendly, but at the individual level, people will still be greedy, using cars, not buses.

Another participant, Lana, spoke mostly about her desire to better fashion her future self. She saw herself as a ‘work-in-progress’ and wanted to become more confident, more open, and kinder. Lana was frustrated that there were no reasonable work opportunities for 17-year-olds, that one needed to be 18 to sign consent forms about confidentiality, thus restricting what jobs they could hold. In the meantime, working on her ‘self’ seemed the best use of time. The indeterminate nature of one’s own future self was a central theme in our conversations. Having taken time out to overcome an eating disorder in a previous year, she wanted no ‘gap year’ experience, just a place at university to study bio-medical science. She wanted to be successful in a ‘different way’, outside of academics, with ‘skills beyond smarts’. Lana was a steampunk fan, drawn to the nostalgia-fuelled, retro-futuristic visions inspired by a steam-powered nineteenth-century aesthetic, which gave her a different sense of time and futures. She wisely noted that ‘the past always gets in the future’ while even the field of robotics did not feel futuristic enough as ‘it’s already here’. Lana was specific about the kinds of ‘culture wars’ that could be exacerbated in the future, …there will be more problems. Like with gay marriage. I’m okay with it now, but some people who I’ve grown up with, (even) when they’re 60, they still won’t approve of it. We’ve not been taught how to deal with this yet….

She imagined a potential scenario by referencing The Hunger Games series:

3.3  Not Worth Convincing Them…

37

…where two sides are not able to talk to each other because values are so different… but this is true even today. People from my rough area will not mix with someone say, from Harrow… not because we don’t like each other but because we don’t mix… it’s really materialistic as well… some have no wealth… or health….

The lack of contact, and of ‘mixing’, and tolerance between different views could steadily increase, entrenching different values, exacerbating an inability to talk to each other, and thus engender conflict. Echoing the questionnaire responses, the most commonly voiced fears about the future were to do with divisions in society, both in Britain and more globally. It is worth noting that the interviews were conducted a few months after the Brexit referendum of 2016 and many of the statements were a commentary on this particular political development. The referendum campaign itself was bad tempered, the results close, and the bitter nature of public discourse has continued long after the result. There was the shocking murder of a female MP, Jo Cox, by a nationalist and indisputable evidence of a sharp rise in racist incidents and hate crime during the campaign and in the years following the result (Opinium, 2019; Devine, 2018). Reports of acrimonious relations dividing families and communities were making the news during the period of fieldwork. There was a sense that ethnonationalism, xenophobia, and racism were no longer beyond the pale of acceptable public discourse. The indeterminate nature of the future and the awareness that the future may have continuities from the past and present but that it can also present with multiply-­ forking pathways was notable in all interactions. Newness was inevitable and endless new possibilities existed. Such indeterminacy was not the source of anxiety or fear in itself. In a reversal of dominant narratives about fears related to uncertain futures, here there was also hope in the possibilities of uncertainty and unpredictability. The fears that were aired were those triggered by futures that would not be different and instead reproduce the monstrosities of the present. In these dystopias, the worst of the present would continue and even exacerbate. There would be a loss of common ground, loss of common experience, and therefore a loss of relatability between people. In so many of the young people’s articulations, there was an engagement with the normal’s capacity to be monstrous and a sense of horror that the (alternative, more promising) future may not materialise. It would be these continuities from the present would be the most problematic for hopeful futures.

3.3  Not Worth Convincing Them… The theme of continuing monstrosities was most clearly articulated in an in-depth interview with one young person, Phil, who was closely invested in the imaginary of a zombie apocalypse. The interview encounter and subsequent analysis of the transcript shows how this ended up being not just an occasion of learning about a young person, but equally, from and with him. The many ways in which he embodied an openness to radically alternative futures became a substantiation of ideas that

38

3  Part I: Apocalypse

were, until then, purely theoretical. I wish to share this sense of discovery through Phil (rather than just about his perspective) with readers. When asked if he would like to choose a pseudonym by which he would be represented, he chose ‘Phil Coulson’ a character from the Marvel Comics world. I regret missing the opportunity to have discussed this further with him, as this was the very final part of our conversations. But over the many enjoyable hours spent investigating this further, I learnt that Phil Coulson’s role was that of an agent (and later, director) of S.H.I.E.L.D,2 an agency that works closely with Marvel superheroes in their common quest to save the universe and its inhabitants from a variety of villainous characters. Amid the superbeings of this universe, Phil is the understated ‘everyman’ – a suit-wearing, wise-cracking, human agent with no superpowers. He may get some witty lines in the film and television outputs, but with no inherent powers, he is said to be the character that audiences identify with, one that helps them grasp the world that frequently slips beyond human control and powers. The choice of this pseudonym, inspired by the more humble (i.e. non super hero) ‘agent’ in the context of a proposed zombie apocalypse felt significant. There is also a storyline in a spin-off TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D where Phil Coulson is revealed to have died and brought back to life through the injection of a mysterious serum/ DNA harvested from a long-dead alien body. He is subsequently also fitted with a robotic hand, after losing his original in an encounter with toxic alien material. Much later, after his death, his memories are uploaded into an LMD (Life Model Decoy) that can pass for the deceased Phil Coulson. In this sense, he is also the ultimate posthuman: a zombie-alien-robot-human amalgam, a more-than-human, a posthuman with no special/super powers, and then, finally, even a posthumous human. Phil’s choice of such a rich fictional character for his pseudonym was unsurprising, given his appetite for and depth of enjoyment of popular culture for young adults. His understanding of what the future could look like was gleaned from a variety of films, books, daily news coverage, television series, and YouTube videos. His interest in zombie fiction started with the film Shawn of the Dead and then grew as he watched Zombieland, The Walking Dead, 28  Days Later, 28  Weeks Later, World War Z, and many others. Apart from the visceral thrill that the horror genre can provide, these multiple resources also supplied him with a range of ideas and images that helped imagine his future self, surviving apocalyptic futures. He believed that the future would very likely contain some sort of an apocalypse, either one caused by a viral outbreak or a mutation of this perhaps leading to a zombie apocalypse, some accident, or disaster leading to a global environmental meltdown or even an apocalypse triggered by war between Russia and NATO countries. He stated that he believed in the likelihood of some kind of apocalypse, mild or severe, hitting his generation to be as high as 8 in 10. The prescience of his words

2   The acronym’s most recent incarnation seems to be, ‘Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division’.

3.3  Not Worth Convincing Them…

39

nearly 5 years later, in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown, lends fresh intensity and new meaning to this interview material. Phil can be said to exhibit an ‘eventful’ sensibility to temporality. Throughout the interview-conversation, Phil seemed to enact ‘an active risk-taking’ by exploring unexpected events and alternative futures (Wilkie et al., 2017, 8). In ‘outing’ himself as a believer in potential zombie apocalypses, he had already taken a risk over his credibility. In the rest of the conversations, he set out ways in which he imagined himself surviving this future by imagining it in painstaking detail and then preparing for it, in the present. Phil talked of how a potential apocalypse could even be triggered by a Toxoplasma gondii outbreak. This is an everyday parasite commonly found in cats, which can cause toxoplasmosis in humans but there is no history to suggest that it could spread like a fatal viral epidemic. The most interesting fact about the parasite is that it appears to have a strange behavioural effect on rodent hosts. For instance, under laboratory conditions, mice infected with the parasite (compared to those that are not) seem to lose their natural and necessary fear of cats, boldly frequenting areas sprayed with cat urine rather than obeying their usual impulses to avoid them (labelled a ‘fatal attraction’ by researchers (Berdoy et al. 2000)). There is also a pop culture reference that nods to Toxoplasma gondii – British author and screen writer Charlie Higson’s post-apocalyptic book series for young adults includes ‘The Enemy’, which contains a plot line where a version of this parasite is suspected of infecting a worldwide population of people over 14 years of age. This turns them into zombies that hunt down the under 14 s, who must try to make sense of this horrific upside-down world and learn to outwit and survive the adult-zombies. What is interesting about Phil’s anticipation of the future is that it is not rooted in scientific facts or historic trends, but much closer to the ‘what if’ that drives speculative fiction. I wish to pause here to note that in the process of ‘studying with’ Phil and his imaginaries of the future, I learnt much, for example, about the uniqueness of the character, Phil Coulson and strangeness of intriguing parasites such as Toxoplasma gondii. That is, he did not offer these explanations to me, but they emerged as part of my ‘study’ when I got around to attuning myself, paying sufficient attention to what was being presented. There were many other lessons to pick up – in insisting on a high possibility for an apocalypse, Phil was insisting on an understanding of everyday security as an illusion that could disappear in an instant – as indeed it feels during the pandemic, in 2021. In the context of popular culture, ‘horror’ is said to arise as a result of a moment of epiphany, a moment of insight. For instance, Nickel (2010) surmises that horror is experienced when the security of the familiar/‘real’ is exposed as a false construction. Horror in this formulation affords the reader/viewer an unfamiliar perspective on ‘common-sense’. He argues that such experiences of horror can produce new but unsettling understandings of how the world works. Horror exposes the illusion of security and our reliance on it and offers, in its place, a more insightful, if terrifying, understanding. It is also true that these narratives grip readers/viewers because the protagonists (and by extension, the viewer/reader) must carry on, even though the world is

40

3  Part I: Apocalypse

indifferent to the human predicament (Fahy, 2010). The actors must continue to act in the presence of fear (Nickel, 2010), brutality, and senselessness. Thus an epistemological good (in the moment of insight) can lead to horrific uncertainty, but with the injunction to act or perish, indicating the rapid transitions between different cognitive and affective experiences when engaging with this genre. Although Phil was unsure when or even what form an outbreak might take, he had mapped out various scenarios and many plans for a range of eventualities: If I was at school (when the news breaks), I’d go home and pick up some other stuff. Cause I have some stuff on me like all the time. But like knives, I can’t take to school. And sleeping bags and stuff like that. …But you wouldn’t stay at home? [Curious about the impulse to leave] No, I’d leave and go to somewhere like ‘Greenacres’ (an area of fields, woodland and water that is accessible even on foot from his school in the city centre). Oh, for the open spaces, …. with trees for cover? [Struggling to keep pace within Phil’s apocalyptic world]. And water. Later, when supplies start running low, …then we’d try and get back to the city to get more stuff. But we wouldn’t stay in the cities. What if it’s winter? [Still struggling to leave behind the comforts of civilisation]. Find a farm… outbuildings. …Cities aren’t good because they are more crowded, and there’s loads of people who aren’t prepared who might die, and even if people survive, they will be fighting over stuff. It would be too dangerous.

The notion of proximity to other humans being the greatest threat is an oft-­ repeated theme in zombie fiction and Phil drew on this to imagine his actions and decisions: ‘If there was a flu pandemic for example… I would not go anywhere near a city. Just get out…’. By contrast, there may be a greater possibility of survival in rural environs with natural water sources and lower density of human population. Phil explained that unless a virus becomes airborne (something he believed may happen at the later stages of such an apocalypse), it is proximity to other humans that would be the greatest threat, and he referenced the spread of Ebola to draw a parallel for my understanding. Five years from the interview, the injunctions of the COVID-19 pandemic  – isolation, quarantining, social distancing, staying away from hospitals, and doctor’s surgeries – eerily echo Phil’s imagined apocalypse. In this imagined future, cultural norms governing society fall away in the desperate fight for survival and quitting such societies offered a better chance of survival. There is behind this formulation, a skepticism about human civilisation and its robustness. It also seemed that a more tenuous attachment to the status quo permitted an easier break from it, compared to my adult, habit-bound qualities, being more invested in social structures and private property. Phil seemed keenly aware of the obstacles that such adults could pose to new futures. What about people? Would you stop for family? Or just get the hell out of there? I’d take my brother but probably not my mother or father. [Laughing]. [Laughing] Why? Because he’s younger, so he will be of more use. And help rebuild society for the future. … I might take some of my friends. We’ve agreed that we’ll all head towards ‘Greenacres’ and then we’ll meet and then decide what to do.

3.4  Prove Me Wrong…

41

Are they friends from your year group? Do they all believe like you? Yes. Some of them believe. Some of them think it’s a possibility but not as seriously as me and other friends.

As it turned out, Phil was not being callous or cold-hearted in choosing to leave behind his parents. His long-running efforts to get them to engage with his vision of possible apocalyptic futures had not gained much ground, leading to mutual frustration, and he did not think that he would ever gain their confidence or convince them. As such, they would only get in the way of trying to survive, with their pre-­ established knowledges, habits, and patterns of thinking. The frustration with adult notions of the future (and thus of how to prepare for it) yielding no quarter to youth and popular culture-based projections was a striking feature of his narrative. The adults for their part were unhappy/bemused/annoyed at having to discuss what were to them, implausible futures that bore no resemblance to how they envisaged and prepared for futures. Phil seemed convinced that trying to proselytize an inattentive audience  – adult or youth  – was not for him: I don’t think it’s worth convincing them…

3.4  Prove Me Wrong… How should we engage with Phil’s frightening and touching narrative that places so little trust in adults or society for security in an imagined apocalypse? And are these sentiments/responses unique to Phil or more widespread in other young people’s consciousness as well? And what lessons do they offer us at this juncture of the Anthropocene? It seems that Phil’s narrative of the imagined zombie apocalypse is a useful study companion to understand something about the idea of posthumanism at the Anthropocene. When Phil regards adult company as undesirable and incapable of responding in a way that will sustain survival, he is indicating that the new future can be built back better without them. He would rather face the inhuman zombies on his own than have to carry adults to their survival (against their inclinations). Most responses to Phil’s narrative have questioned if ethics and safeguarding procedures were followed. They were, and Phil has since made it to a successful university trajectory. The responses indicate a concern about whether enough was done to protect and support him. Perhaps this indicates something disturbing, even unacceptable in his imagined narrative. Perhaps this arises from his positing of adults and contemporary society as worse than the threat of zombies. One of the common criticisms directed at zombie fiction is that it manufactures the threat of an inhumanity (zombies) directed towards humans. We then imagine the warding off of the threat from outside, rather than from the inside. We are also persuaded that this is some future, unreal dystopia (Colebrook, 2014). Phil’s narrative twists this well-worn cliché on its head. Another response could be that this is yet another redemption narrative that once again returns humans to the centre of the survival scene, in the form of good humans (children) saving humanity, not just

42

3  Part I: Apocalypse

from zombies but from bad humans (adults). This both romanticises the young and naively subscribes to a kind of human triumph. Phil seems to be willing to ask the ultimate question of posthumanism: what is the justification for humanity to survive? (Colebrook, 2014). I will return to this blasphemous question in a while, when considering Phil’s imagined future, post the zombie apocalypse. When linked to the voices of climate activists, and those reflected in youth surveys, there is a substantial body of evidence to point out how they also echo Phil’s frustrations and damning indictment of adult attitudes. In a speech, Thunberg says: …I want to challenge those companies and those decision-makers into real and bold climate action. To set their economic goals aside and to safeguard the future living conditions for humankind. I don’t believe for one second that you will rise to that challenge. I want to ask you all the same. I ask you to prove me wrong…. (Thunberg, 2019, 18)

The impulse to keep asking and trying arises from an (impossible) hope that things might yet change within the horizon of the 12 years (at the time of the speech) left to bring carbon emissions to adequate levels. This time horizon and reminders of how it is being rapidly run down is an oft-repeated feature of climate activists’ pleas. Among the group discussions with other young people in my own fieldwork, this idea that older generations have a different orientation and response to young people’s concerns arose in discussions about how they might have a greater say in shaping their future. The conversations inevitably turned to the Brexit referendum and the debates about who could be eligible to vote in future elections. With none of the UK’s countries except Scotland allowing 16-year-olds to vote in their parliamentary elections, the referendum was open only to those over 18 (but excluding resident EU citizens). We talked about Brexit amongst ourselves a lot. We thought we should have been allowed to vote. The majority of people we spoke to, who couldn’t vote, would have voted to ‘Remain’. Whereas the older generations voted ‘Leave’. If we’d been able to vote, it would have looked very different….

Here was an open critique of an exclusionary system of decision making and of unequal inter-generational relations with direct consequences for their futures. There was a sense of youth concerns going unheard or treated as less important, and a lack of reciprocity between generations. It is not hard to see the link between the horror of worsening social relations in the future and their perception of already being marginalised as non-participants in the present. Here was a horror from knowing, through epiphanic moments (such as Brexit) as well as through an emergent insight into the illusion of adults as a source of security either now or in the future. Adult society, through its responses and actions, were seen as being actively involved in securing futures, but these were not always desirable/desired futures from young peoples’ perspectives. This exuded a dystopian mood that was sharply critical and deeply disturbing. These sentiments have been subsequently verified by a range of national polls. They suggest that the demand for the UK to leave the EU came from older voters and that age was the big divide. Older Leave voters were also inclined to accept

3.4  Prove Me Wrong…

43

damage to the economy as a price worth paying (71% of over 65  s), including accepting a member of their own family losing their job. Such ‘extreme’ views were found only in a minority of younger Leave voters (Merick, 2017). While such commentary can be criticised for being divisive, and deepening the generational divide, there is little or nothing by comparison to suggest whether the concerns of young people about their futures are being considered. In contrast to this fatalistic narrative of youth being born ‘too late to influence the course of the future’, there is another one of youth being ‘too young to be entrusted with influence’, even if they are not too late or too young to know. The idea of ‘knowing’ children/youth (Higonnet, 1998) has always been an uncomfortable one within existing systems which are not always ready to allow for and accommodate ‘knowing’ youth as equally credible partners. This tension was illustrated repeatedly in the school climate strikes (2019–2020) where one of the loudest pleas was directed at those already part of the system – those whose are in positions to take actions that can count towards change – to take action on behalf of the young who feel excluded, yet retain a keen sense of time running out. The pain of such awareness has been echoed in Thunberg’s speeches: ‘…The future of all the coming generations rests on your shoulders. Those of us who are still children can’t change what you do now once we’re old enough to do something about it’ (2019, 4). The irreversibility of climate change and the need to act immediately seems to be the most ‘hopeless’ of problems that the young are keenly aware of. The notion of irreversible futures that are unwelcome is truly horrifying. Its poignant effect only becomes visible through the lens of youth: … If I live to be 100 I will be alive in the year 2103. When you think about the future today, you don’t think beyond the year 2050. By then I will, in the best case, not even have lived half of my life. What happens next? The year 2078 I will celebrate my seventy-fifth birthday. What we do or don’t do, right now, will affect my entire life, and the lives of my children and grandchildren…. (2019, 10-11)

This offers a twist to Lawrence Gross’ point about the embedding of apocalyptic trauma onto the following generations in a never-ending tragedy. Here, the stress relates to an approaching apocalypse, some kind of pre-apocalyptic stress syndrome. When the future is examined from this viewpoint, to the sound of the ticking doomsday clock, the forthcoming apocalypse does indeed feel more terrifying. In turn, this raises the question of ethics as relationality between generations, as a defining issue of this epoch. … People always tell us that they are so hopeful. They are hopeful that the young people are going to save the world, but we are not. There is simply not enough time to wait for us to grow up and become the ones in charge. Because by the year 2020 we need to have bended the emissions curve step downward. (2019, 34–35) … And I’m sorry but saying everything will be all right while continuing doing nothing at all is just not hopeful to us. In fact, it’s the opposite of hope. And yet this is exactly what you keep doing. You can’t just sit around waiting for hope to come. You’re acting like spoiled, irresponsible children. You don’t seem to understand that hope is something you have to earn. (2019, 40).

44

3  Part I: Apocalypse

3.5  Beyond the Singular Narrative The contraction of time left to act, the sense of doom and bitterness about being let down by the people in charge are all unfortunately not unique to just climate activists. The children’s charity, Barnardo’s (2019) survey of 1000 young people between 16 and 24 years in the UK, showed that 62% felt the government cared more about older generations than their generation, and 67% of young people believed that in general their generation will be worse off than their parents’ generation. 54% (over half) of young people said climate change is one of the most important issues facing this country. When asked to choose the most important issues facing the UK over the next 5 years, 62% (two thirds) of young people chose Britain leaving the EU, and 54% (over half) of young people chose climate change. 50% also said they felt their generation would be ‘worse off’ in regards to ‘having a sense of purpose’ than their parents’ generation. 69% felt they will have worse ‘overall happiness and mental health’ compared to their parents’ generation. They saw climate change as ‘the most important to their generation which older generations didn’t seem to understand or care about’. Critiques of the ‘singular narrative’, the one that presents itself as offering the only or most significant meaning, caution us about how we engage with such narratives. It makes sense to sift through the variety of information about/on young people (of varying qualities and statuses) and pay attention to several kinds of ‘stories’ to sharpen our awareness and acknowledge the breadth and depth of young people’s concerns and desires. I now wish to draw attention to another survey with starkly different results on youth perspectives on the future. In one survey, 43% reported being optimistic/excited about the future, 22% were uncertain, and only 33% had negative feelings. An overwhelming 82% felt their standard of living would improve (including 67% whose current standards of living are poor) and 81% believed that technology would change their fortunes for the better. These striking findings come from the African Youth Survey (2020) of 4200 young people from 14 countries from East, West, and Southern Africa, between 18 and 24 years, with a 50:50 gender split. 65% believed that the twenty-first century would be the ‘African Century’. With a median age of just under 20, Africa is the most youthful and it seems the most optimistic continent. Other highlights from the survey showed that the young believed in Pan-African values and unity. While they were ambivalent about democracy’s operation in Africa, they believed in the democratic values of tolerance and freedom. Employment opportunities and corruption were recognised as the most serious challenges in the present. These hopes and worries match the Ispos (2016) African Youth survey, conducted over 7 countries and 1400 phone interviews. Then too, 81% reported being optimistic about their own future, higher than their optimism for their country (65%). Some features of note in this trawl of surveys emerge. Firstly, it seems that in global surveys of youth and adults, young people in general expect a brighter future for themselves, compared to prospects for their society, country, or the world. There is a sense of greater hope for themselves as individuals than in the collectives around

3.6  Apocalypse as Frame of Intelligibility

45

them. There are several ways to read this, and one that I propose is that young people are not necessarily mindlessly optimistic or arrogantly individualistic but that they feel their individual lives are more in their hands than the fate of wider publics. Secondly, surveys among youth in low-income countries show them to be more optimistic than youth in higher-income ones. A global survey by Ipsos (2018) reporting from over 40,000 interviews (7500 youth interviews) across 15 nations (Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and the United States) showed levels of optimism to be highest in low- and middle-income countries, and young people in these countries were the most optimistic group, across all measures. For example, 89% of 12–24-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries said they were optimistic about their future compared with 74% in higher-income countries. When asked about the future of the world, 79% of 12–24-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries said they were optimistic compared with 50% in higher-­ income countries. Here too, if we take these findings at face value, there is room to speculate if falling social mobility or widening inequalities in higher-income countries contribute to feelings of pessimism about prosperous futures. There is also room to consider if youth in high-income countries feel it is inevitable that the upwardly mobile lifestyles of their older generations are not infinitely sustainable into the future. Thirdly, it seems that youth, for all their pessimism, are still largely more optimistic than the adults in each society, high or low income. Only 44% of adults in Great Britain were optimistic about the future of their country, the second-­ lowest proportion of any country compared to 57% of their youth. On face value, these surveys seem to suggest that residing in economically ‘advanced’ nations does not offer a greater sense of optimism in facing the future. Whatever the causal variables and possible explanations behind these figures, it is evident that there is more than one narrative about youth and futures and that adult fears of youth pessimism need to be handled with greater criticality.

3.6  Apocalypse as Frame of Intelligibility Anthropologist Lucas Bessire (2011) observes the Ayoreo-speaking people in Paraguay using apocalyptic futures as a pragmatic ‘frame of intelligibility’ to make sense of the savagery and senselessness of ‘contact’ and the narrow epistemes of subsequent systems of development. Indigenous populations repeatedly use an apocalyptic frame to talk of the future when faced with the demands of modernist nation states to reimagine their cultures and humanity in specific ways. The apocalypse has long been used as an effective device by Christian missionaries to draw people away from native faiths/beliefs into Christian conversion. In these narratives, surviving the apocalypse is for the chosen few who will be rewarded by new bodies and a heavenly abode. To achieve such goodness in the future always required a price in the present – public acts of renunciation of old ways, and adoption of actions and beliefs in defiance of past beliefs. This is carrot and stick in one effective

46

3  Part I: Apocalypse

schema, but also becomes a way of making sense of continuing trauma and violence, a way to come to terms with the death of previous beings and ways of living. Under such cruel conditions, it is a ‘cognitive template for patterning the relationships between events and persons’ (2011, 744) and helps ‘organise meaning in the present from the vantage of an imagined future’ (2011, 755). To make sense of a senseless inheritance is also perhaps the predicament of youth that drives the youthful apocalyptic imaginary. I wish to make note of how this imaginary from youth may derive from external sources, such as popular culture (Futurama, Steampunk, Zombie fiction) but also deviate from it in significant and hopeful ways. Gregory Claeys, author of Dystopia: A Natural History (2016), is sympathetic to the idea that the young are much more receptive (compared to adults) to what is going on, particularly in relation to the misery of social and ecological destruction and that they ‘filter [events] differently from the way older people do, … [with] a sense of hopelessness which… older adults don’t have, because they [the young] are not part of the system and increasingly, they clearly have a feeling that they never will be, that they will be denied this in perpetuity’ (BBC R4, Open Book, 31/12/17). Francesca Haig, author of the Fire Sermon series of books for young adults, notes that her readers are not full of ‘narcissistic, solipsistic angst’, rather that they look outward and ask big questions about matters beyond their immediate experience such as climate change, women’s rights, democratic freedoms, and so on. Dystopian or apocalyptic fiction then ‘becomes hugely appealing because it allows the imagining of a world in which betrayal and disenfranchisement through systems of adult authority are exposed, and can be dismantled for more desirable futures’ (BBC R4, Open Book, 31/12/17). In adult popular culture’s rendition of the apocalypse, the survival narrative tends to be based on ‘patriarchal pedagogies of survival’, on an ethos premised on claiming and fortifying territory, fending off (un) human others, hoarding resources, and securing reproductive labour (Trimble, 2012). The necropolitics of the zombie metaphor tends to favour the able-bodied white male hero, replaying undead elements of colonial and exploitative histories. The ‘skill-set’ of the survivors consists of competence in handling military weapons, combat skills, and other ‘masculinised’ ways of preparing for disruption (Rahm & Skageby, 2016). Where these narratives do expose ethical and affective alternatives, these may be signalled through marginal figures of women and children (Trimble, 2012). Outside popular culture, it is not uncommon for government agencies or national bodies to use the metaphor of the apocalypse to disseminate preparedness pedagogies. Scholars have critiqued these as being steeped in racist assumptions and values (Nelson, 2002; Preston, 2010). Preston (2010) notes how a range of preparedness materials in the form of cartoons, films, and booklets tend to use analog stick figures to perpetuate white heteronormativity and to ‘pathogenize’ – when a pathogen/disaster is coded by racist discourse and practice – a minoritized group. We have seen this recently in the mislabelling of the Coronavirus as the ‘Chinese’ or ‘Wuhan’ virus. Preparedness materials have also tended to create a myth of racial neutrality (we are all in this together; the virus does not discriminate) while ignoring increasing racial inequalities (evacuation responses that discriminated against black populations during

3.6  Apocalypse as Frame of Intelligibility

47

Hurricane Katrina in the US or increased death rates in the UK/US among people of Black and minority ethnic backgrounds during the COVID-19 pandemic). Preparedness pedagogies and the survivalist ethos thus far have offered little to those outside existing circuits of power. In other words, surviving the apocalypse is figured as ‘more of the same’ in hegemonic discourse. In Phil’s narrative there is a more hopeful departure from this trope even as he wishes for militaristic accoutrements like guns, flares, and masks. The departure seems to arise from his youthfulness, his not-yet adultness. His age leaves him legally unable to purchase any of these materials. Neither does he have the requisite purchasing power as a 15-year-old. And quite apart from his social, legal, and economic positioning as underage youth, there was also a deep suspicion of adults as a group, because of their orientation to the future. These binds on him seem to direct him to look elsewhere to build a different set of skills and solidarities. When asked how he would be able to relate to other people at a time of heightened paranoia, panic, and distrust, his answers foregrounded his sense of solidarity with other young people: How will you know if a stranger is safe or trustworthy? If they seem in need, I’d help them. If they’re children, they’re probably going to be good people. The best thing is to just ask them if they’ve been bitten. Then maybe keep them near but not with the group. Keep an eye on them and you’d know how long before the virus turns them into zombies….

This formulation of the young as ‘probably good people’ may strike some as naïve. But this can be read as a ‘double consciousness’ caused by the liminality shared by youth, and based on Phil’s prior experience of adult responses. Having established that he would be one of the first to leave the city, Phil’s priority would be to secure safe drinking water by arriving at a site of a vast watering hole. How safe would the water be though? (Patiently, explaining to the unprepared adult) Water needs to be filtered, boiled and disinfected. …I’ve got water filtration equipment and tablets for disinfecting. I have this with me all the time. Have you tried using it? (Again, patiently) No, I’m saving it. But I’ve practised filtering water and making fires in my back garden. Phil would have taken dried and canned food when leaving the city. There would be regular food inventory checks, with food being carefully rationed for use. We’d also hunt, so try and mix it up, so the food can last longer.

Phil’s reference to hunting was a serious one, with his post-exam summer plan including archery lessons, as part of his work towards a Duke of Edinburgh award3 that he was aiming for. In doing this, he aimed to satisfy both his intentions to train to survive the apocalypse and the more normative ambitions of parents and teachers 3  Duke of Edinburgh award – a youth achievement award that promotes a range of skills and activities for young people and also hopes to enhance CVs and employability profiles. https://www.dofe. org/about-us-2/

48

3  Part I: Apocalypse

to improve his curriculum vitae. By focusing on building survival ‘skills’ rather than stockpiling materials like food or weapons, as survivalist ‘Preppers’4 would, Phil was able to hold a balance between getting on with his everyday life (preparing for exams, meeting school and family obligations, socializing with friends) while also preparing to survive a zombie apocalypse. Meanwhile, Thunberg uses the apocalypse as a frame of intelligibility in communicating her sense of the impending climate apocalypse: … our survival is depending on a small, rapidly disappearing carbon budget. And hardly anyone even knows it exists…. (2019, 42) …We live in a strange world, where all the united science tells us that we are about eleven years away from setting off an irreversible chain reaction, way beyond human control, that will probably be the end of our civilization as we know it…. (2019, 41) … Around the year 2030, 10 years, 259 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we will set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it. That is, unless in that time permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50 percent. And please note that these calculations are depending on inventions that have not yet been invented at scale. Inventions that are supposed to clear our atmosphere of astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide. (2019, 46).

Expressing skepticism towards tech-utopian solutions to deliver, she claims: …these calculations do not include unforeseen tipping points and feedback loops, like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing Arctic permafrosts. Nor do they include already locked-in warming, hidden by air pollution, nor the aspect of equity, nor climate justice, clearly stated throughout the Paris Agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale. We must also bear in mind that these are just calculations, estimations, meaning that the point of no return may occur a bit sooner or later than that. No one can know for sure. We can however be certain that they will occur approximately in these time-frames…. (2019, 46)

Seven days later, she delivered a similar speech and heeding the ticking of the clock, knocked off 7 days from the previous speech: Around the year 2030, 10 years, 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we will set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it. (2019, 59)

In spite of the extensive and irrefutable scientific evidence that is cited in her speeches as the basis for pre-apocalypse action, the fact that Thunberg is still a child, at 16 (in 2020), was often cited as reason not to heed her message, or as a reason to doubt its authenticity. In one of her speeches, Thunberg notes: … ‘there is one complaint that I ‘sound and write like an adult’. And to that I can only say: Don’t you think that a sixteen-year-old can speak for herself?’ (2019, 31). And later: 4  On zombie survivalists, see the essay by Christopher Zealand “The National Strategy for Zombie Containment: myth meets activism in post-9/11 America” in Generation Zombie: essays on the living dead in modern culture. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, eds. McFarland & Co., Jefferson, NC, 2011.

3.6  Apocalypse as Frame of Intelligibility

49

There is one other argument that I can’t do anything about. And that is the fact that I’m ‘just a child and we shouldn’t be listening to children’. But that is easily fixed – just start to listen to the rock-solid science instead. (2019, 32)

However, Thunberg is living proof that children are ‘knowing’ and can and do understand these ‘big’ issues, often grasping the urgency differently, more intensely and personally, compared to most adults. In her speeches, we see the repeated signalling of children as capable of knowledge and action and of adults as obtuse or obstructive: Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that Homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop the emission of greenhouse gases…. (2019, p 21)

Other ways in which Thunberg was seen as an inauthentic youth was by rendering her as ‘faulty’: Some people mock me for my diagnosis. But Asperger is not a disease, it’s a gift. People also say that since I have Asperger I couldn’t possibly have put myself in this position. But that’s exactly why I did this. Because if I would have been ‘normal’ and social, I would have organised myself in an organisation or started an organisation by myself. But since I am not that good at socialising I did this [being a lone striker outside the Swedish parliament] instead…. (2019, 30)

Anthropologists of the future, Bryant and Knight (2019) ask us to look closer at teleologies of actions (towards making or stopping futures) and how they are shaped by certain affective orientations (such as anticipation, expectation, speculation). In the case of Phil and Greta, we can see the workings of the orientations of expectation, anticipation, and speculation, all framed by the imaginary of the apocalypse but a youthful one that is distinct and particular. The expectation of a zombie apocalypse instigates a series of everyday actions (acquiring water filtration tablets, learning manual mechanics, or about the spread of viruses) and speculative skills (learning archery, building fires, staying fit) under the largely unhelpful gaze of adults. The anticipation of the ‘end of civilisation as we know it’ through an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control leads Greta to a series of actions that culminated in a period of global climate strikes by school children. Both instances lead us back to considering the responsibilities and actions of adult society in relation to the young. Responses such as questioning the propriety of youth who dare to challenge adult behaviour are not uncommon. Over the ages, in a variety of contexts, there has been a regular demand from adults to children, that they behave in a recognisably child-like manner, a demand that is an impossible one for children to live up to (Bruhm & Hurley, 2004; MacLure et  al., 2012; Priyadharshini, 2011). It is a demand that imprisons youth in adult expectations that are rarely reflective of their own response to life experiences. The series of unhelpful and obstructive responses by influential adults wielding political and media power signals a deep suspicion of youth as much as a fear of what might have to go/ change, if they are right. At the Anthropocene, an apocalyptic imaginary asks us to consider what needs to go.

50

3  Part I: Apocalypse

3.7  Cathedral Thinking For Phil, the apocalyptic future was an exercise in imagination, an opportunity to devise ingenious solutions to the problems of the present, as well as a preparation for uncertain and therefore unexpectedly hopeful futures. Phil was always pithy and precise with his answers, showing considerable forethought in what kind of emergency supplies, including medicines, he would need and their purposes. What if you need a doctor? I don’t know…. Would you go to a hospital in the city? I’d like to go to a vet’s as it’s less likely to have been raided, and some things are the same. Aren’t you afraid you might give yourself the wrong dose or medication? Kind of… But if you’re going to die anyway….

Phil was keen to avoid hospitals both because they could be the source of the pestilence and possibly populated by other infected beings. It would also attract other non-infected humans for the drugs it might hold. This meant that although a hospital might be the predictable destination, for apocalyptic times, it could be the most dangerous one. Phil felt he was not taking an unnecessary risk but a calculated one with visiting a vet’s surgery. Staying alive during apocalyptic times meant playing by a different set of rules in a new game. This new game required bold, even risky modes of thinking and being that radically depart from past advice. This may be particularly difficult to digest when we subscribe to different notions of security and safety. One of the times I struggled to keep up with Phil in this zombie-infected landscape was his dedication to be always on the move: So you’ve moved to ‘Greenacres’. Isn’t it still too close to the city? I would move out after a while. Why? Because in the Walking Dead, whenever they’ve stayed in one place, they’ve been attacked. Sooo… it’s better to be nomadic? Yes. Isn’t it difficult? You could get attached to a really safe place. Wouldn’t it be hard to just move for the sake of it, before an attack for instance? No, there is no perfectly safe place. You couldn’t perfectly fortify it. That’s so hard for me to imagine, leaving a seemingly safe place just to keep moving when zombies may be on the loose. Maybe that’s me being stupid… (Silence)… Hmm… so, what would you do if you had differences of opinion like this, within your group? Leave them. Would it be hard? Emotionally? Probably, but I’d be thinking of surviving.

Our different inclinations pointed to very different ontologies of the apocalyptic world. Phil’s more radical sensibilities embraced newness, supported alternate orientations, actions, and futures. Phil intended to survive. In this he seemed determined to be hard-headed but not exploitative, unsentimental but not entirely devoid of emotion. Having given the zombie apocalypse some serious thought for several years, he was confident that he was better prepared than most others to survive. Key strategies like leaving the city early, lying low, staying on the move, and offering

3.7  Cathedral Thinking

51

help wherever possible without allowing anything to tie him down were articulated clearly but always with a sense of flexibility to allow for other new and as yet unthought-of situations. In studying with Phil, I felt confronted by the anthropologist’s ontological dilemma – whether to comprehend Phil’s narratives and beliefs as unusual worldviews or whether they signalled a different world entirely. If we are to take seriously the challenge of the ‘ontological turn’ (Heywood, 2017; Viveiros de Castro, 1998, 2003), then perhaps we need to ask how our schema as adult social science researchers need to be altered to comprehend this youth’s apocalyptic world. In doing this, I am proposing that we consider how youth be viewed afresh, as perhaps not human but alien, as other to adult. This approach focuses attention on difference and otherness, making us more acutely aware of the need for alternative ways of relating to and researching with youth and their worlds. Another way of saying this would be to ask how the worlds of youth like Greta, Phil, Jo, or Lana and their different modes of time and life, generate particular ways of knowing, and how adult researchers can come to comprehend these knowledges and modes of life. In the following pages, I outline how affect, when we pay sufficient attention, comes to drive some of this comprehension. Studying Phil’s apocalyptic narrative drew attention to the affective understanding of the thin line between fear and exhilaration. Scholars have noted the paradox of several appealing functions of horror/apocalyptic/dystopian genres, most obviously, the immediate pleasures and intense affective, bodily experiences they offer. Racing pulses, sweaty palms, dry mouths, and the inability to look away or to scream are tolerable even pleasurable, because the genre allows us to encounter the dangerous and horrific in a safe context – when the book/movie ends, there is a feeling of relief and control regained (Fahy, 2010). Abut apart from functioning as an important outlet to express young people’s worst fears and anxieties, apocalyptic/ dystopian visions of the future are tied up with exciting and hopeful possibilities, the consideration of which is joyful. If hope resided in the possibility that apocalyptic futures may allow an undoing of the normal monstrosities of the present, then thrills/joys emerged in imagining a survival within the darkest of paths out of dystopia. The affective thrills of such moments have been noted in musical genres like Jungle (Fisher, 2014) or Detroit techno music (Pope, 2011) or Grime, which arose out of despair and frustration but offered a discernible ‘jouissance’. Fisher has written of the ‘lure of the dark’ of Jungle music as: A libidinsation of anxiety itself, a transformation of flight and fight impulses into enjoyment….At a certain point, the unrelieved negativity of the dystopian drive trips over into a perversely utopian gesture, and annihilation becomes the condition of the radically new. (2014, 31)

In Phil’s zombie apocalypse narrative, there is a sense of exhilaration in simply imagining a new mode of survival which was contagious. In the following extract, it is clear that the contagion of the exhilaration of horror infects both speaker and listener. Rather than posing questions and struggling to keep up with unusual

52

3  Part I: Apocalypse

decisions as I had been doing until this point, I was getting drawn into the challenge of being a co-survivor, even a study companion at the end of the world: Ok, so you have the basics – water, food, fire and shelter. What about medicines? What if someone had some chronic condition, like they needed inhalers for asthma? Yeah. I’m asthmatic anyway. So you will need your inhalers? Let me guess - you’ll take as much as you can when you leave the city. How? Raid a pharmacy? Yes, there’s two near me anyway. I’d probably head to one near my dad’s because if I do, I can also pick up my bike. Better than a car, less noisy and will attract less attention…. The queues and quarrels over fuel, rehearsed in several apocalyptic films/tele-series ensured the need for no further explanation. So get the bike, go to pharmacy, and… raid it? What will you take? Some antibiotics, inhalers, some paracetamol.

But for Thunberg and her army of young school climate change strikers, the ‘unrelieved negativity’ is all too real with few prospects for relief. She lists the sixth mass extinction, erosion of top soil, deforestation, toxic air pollution, and the acidification of oceans as all continuing monstrosities and asks, ‘What do we want the future living conditions for all species to be like?’ (2019, 56). The solution to the seemingly irresolvable issue is referenced by Thunberg herself in another speech – cathedral thinking: We have to start treating the crisis like a crisis – and act even if we don’t have all the solutions.’ ‘That’s still not an answer,’ you say. Then we start talking about a circular economy and rewilding nature and the need for a just transition. Then you don’t understand what we are talking about. We say that all those solutions needed are not known to anyone and therefore we must unite behind the science and find them together along the way. But you do not listen to that. Because those answers are for solving a crisis that most of you don’t even fully understand. Or don’t want to understand. You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don’t exist anymore. Because you did not act in time. Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling. (2019, 65-67, emphasis mine)

A notable theme that keeps recurring in these fragments of youth visions of an apocalyptic future is that solutions to relieve the negativity are perceived to be readily available. As Thunberg notes, it is the fear of a radically different future, one which ends dominant ways of thinking/living that remains an obstacle. Where the thought of annihilation of things that ‘need to go’ can lead to exhilaration in some, in others there is a retrenchment into the old, and the newness proposed becomes incomprehensible. However, this battle between the old and the new is not just a problem with dominant imaginaries. Examining the case of the zombie metaphor, Rahm and Skageby (2016) note how it is so weighted with specific rules that it is no longer an unknown fear but a familiar one. Their examination of the rules of ‘prepping’ (practically preparing) for the zombie apocalypse has identified a predominant view that the physical body best predicted to survive an apocalyptic scenario is one that resorts to military skills, tactics, outfits, and arms. In other words, this means that independent, resourceful, sceptical men loaded with ‘proper’ gear and ‘proper’ skills are often seen as the ones best equipped to outlast ‘the rest’.

3.7  Cathedral Thinking

53

Phil’s plans may overlap with the survivalists’ ethos is his conception of survival as an endurance event, where the imperative is simply to survive unimaginable catastrophe if necessary, on his own. But he also diverged from the dominant narrative when he revealed that surviving on his wits, with low-tech solutions was viral. As we all know, the only way to kill a zombie is to blow a hole through its brain. Guns would be useful for this. But Phil had also paid attention to several low-tech ways to protect oneself. He referenced the movie ‘World War Z’ to say: It showed stuff that I’ve never learnt anywhere else. Like this guy [Brad Pitt], he wraps a magazine around his arm with duct tape. To stop zombie bites [from infecting him]. So no need for high-tech Kevlar or bullet-proof armour? No!

Other queries yielded simple but ingenious plans. …what would you need to know to escape the zombies? Just make a loud noise to distract them. Avoid drawing attention to yourself. …And what if there was say, some biological warfare? Do you have gas masks? No, mum won’t let me get it. But I do know how to make a gas mask.

Phil then proceeded to explain how he could assemble a make-shift gas mask with a water bottle, a sock, and some charcoal. He was aware of its limitations but claimed it was more important to always act to survive with whatever resources were at hand. Phil felt that television and radio, if they were still working would be useful, the main sources of information in the apocalypse rather than any form of digital/electronic communication. In relation to this, he enjoyed his design and technology class: Helps me make stuff up. At the moment I’m making a clock… something mechanical… mechanical skills are always useful. Maybe biology too. It can help understand how viruses spread …. PE is good too. It helps me keep my fitness up.

Phil’s source of knowledge, ingenious plans, and strategies for this dystopian future were movies, television series, YouTube, survival programmes, and zombie survival books and kits. This range meant that he was less likely to follow any one school of thought and seemed more keen to keep expanding his sources as no one was going to be able to predict anything with any accuracy. That is, although the zombie apocalypse may now be a familiar fear, Phil was constantly seeking out solutions and openings that are not reliant on established rules alone. When the discussions during my fieldwork moved on to identifying how schools and formal education could equip young people to meet the range of anticipated futures, among the list were requests for developing ‘skills to assess news’ and media reports from a variety of sources, discussions of party political ‘manifestos and promises’ made before elections and referendums (even if they were not yet allowed to vote), and tips to cope with ‘life after school’ including at university and ‘living with student debt’. These comprise the areas that Jo described as schools ‘never go(ing) there’. Phil’s particular desire was for students to access ‘preparedness classes’ for a range of scenarios such as power outages, pandemic outbreaks, outdoor survival skills, and subsistence skills such as growing food/vegetables. This

54

3  Part I: Apocalypse

long wish list from the young has the qualities of a cabinet of curiosities, juxtaposing myriad skills without the rationality of adult order, encapsulating the diverse fears that young people would like to face/survive. They stem from speculative imaginaries of the future that draw from current dissatisfactions and signal a clear desire to retain a sense of agency and resilience for even the most dystopian of futures. It is also a strikingly pragmatic list and one that points to the deficiencies in current educational provision, to prepare young people for uncertain futures. It echoes at least partially, one of the youth survey reports considered earlier (Children’s Society, 2019) which notes: Across the chapters of this report, school emerges as an important theme for further focus. Not only are scores for the school domain of our Good Childhood Index consistently low, but more recent figures from Understanding Society suggest there may have been a dip in satisfaction with school in the most recent wave of the survey. Our analysis on poverty and well-being also highlights connections between income poverty and financial strain and children’s feelings about school at age 14. Taking these findings at face value suggests that a key way of improving children’s subjective experience may be to improve their experience of school. (2019, 14)

It has been long established that poverty diminishes life experiences including those at school. While schools may have limited resources to alleviate child poverty, they can certainly offer richer experiences, mirroring their passions and revealing their relevance to how young people’s wishes to prepare for and create their futures. And engaging with youth imaginaries of the future could be one way of re-­ enchanting an unsatisfactory school experience. In response to my question about his expectations of a future post-apocalyptic world, Phil said, ‘It’ll be simpler. It will use less resources. So it will extend humanity. We’ll be fewer, so we wouldn’t then cause global warming or cause pollution’. As with many others of his generation, the extraction, exhaustion, and ruination of the planet was a serious concern for Phil, one which was willing to accept a diminishing, an existence that lessened human impact and curtailed their excesses. The idea that new ways of living could emerge from the ashes of the apocalypse was a distinct hope and perhaps is a hint of his motivation to simply survive the disaster, whatever its form. However, he also knew that talk of return to a simpler life would not be that easy to accomplish. To simply return to the life of ‘cave people’ was unattractive to him. His desire was to find new worlds in which life could continue to evolve. ‘I like [the idea of] space travel. I’d rather we went into space than go back to the simpler life’. The idea that space exploration may offer earthlings a higher goal, a way of being ‘more than human’ is a significant theme of speculative fiction and Phil’s insistence that the future must be both less wasteful, yet visionary echoes this idea. Phil’s speculation can be seen as falling into a sort of escapist, redemptive framework. But his denial of a future to adult society as it exists points to generational differences over what kinds of futures are desired. As mentioned earlier, Phil’s narrative seems willing to ask the unacceptable questions that are ‘constantly displaced and disfigured’ (Colebrook, 2014, 202): whether man ought to survive, how human

3.8  Lessons from the Apocalypse

55

life might justify itself, and ‘whether the survival of what has come to be known as life is something we should continue to admit as the only acceptable option’. Perhaps this is what disturbs us about Phil’s narrative that it articulates the blasphemous and unacceptable.

3.8  Lessons from the Apocalypse This section has tried to advance the case for an embrace of youth’s apocalyptic imaginary and its monstrous lessons. There is no denying that the apocalyptic imaginary is a troubling one. When it combines with young people’s visions for the future, the discomfort becomes more acute. For many adults, listening to children and young people talking of the end of the world is troubling. Whether the narrative is premediated by popular culture like Phil’s or whether the narrative is informed by scientific discourse in the climate strikers’ narratives, adult discomfort may be a habitual response but one that demands deeper critical reflection. There is criticism that branches of education (such as environmental education) are focused too much on problems and pessimistic views of the future. This is viewed as a danger that this will reduce children’s confidence in being able to make a difference (Lidstone & Stoltman, 2007; Jonsson et al., 2012). On the other hand, researchers such as Ojala (2007), Persson et al. (2011), and Villanen and Johnsson (2013) note that young people’s worries concerning the environment can have a positive impact, prompting action at local and global levels. It seems that much of the discomfort is rooted in traditional notions of adulthood and childhood that deserve unpacking and re-orienting. It seems clear that adult acceptance of the right of youth to imagined apocalyptic futures is a pre-condition to the creation of alternative, desired futures. There are risks that in doing so we might encourage a self-­ fulfilling prophecy where the young are left with nothing but a depressing, nihilistic vision of the future. We know that media creations of dystopian futures can work to making real the very futures that need to be avoided (Coleman & Tutton, 2017) – widening inequality, deepening individualism, and social fractures. But there seems to be a bigger risk if adults obfuscate or are caught lying. On the other hand, there could be common ground to be forged between the generations as a result of this approach. Adults feel that their role is to reassure, protect, and offer hope to the young, perhaps even resolve their problems. But ‘knowing’ children and youth do not want to be placated with false promises. They want live-able, love-able futures that seem to be receding from the horizon. Adult fears that they are not able to deliver this need or that the young may even want to face zombies rather than include adult humans in their imagined futures need to be confronted. Rather than focusing on offering hopeful narratives or deflecting youthful fears and anxieties, this engagement faces the unacceptable questions around a very posthumanism. While ‘shifting the intensities’ (Savransky et  al., 2017, 14) with which futures are felt is a

56

3  Part I: Apocalypse

worthwhile goal, it is one that would ring hollow if it refuses to engage with the apocalyptic imaginary. This, too, is cathedral thinking. Laying the foundations for cathedrals perhaps is not only about thinking on an ambitious and grandiose scale about future achievements but also about the end of life itself. In the second summer of the Covid-19 pandemic, it feels important to imagine a pedagogical approach that can handle the horror-insanity-death triumvirate that is already upon us (Lysgaard et  al., 2019). Perhaps it is appropriate then, to end with speculative fiction writer N. K. Jemisin’s words on what it means to be apocalyptic: If we stake a claim upon the present right now, right here, it is this: that apocalypse can be a way to live, a way to think, a way to work together, a way to flourish in a world that might not have a future but that demands our action nonetheless. (Hurley & Synikin, 2018, 464)

3.9  Meanwhile… Researching in the middle (Springgay & Truman, 2019) calls for us to pay attention to the many developments, ideas, and events that spin off from moments in the research. Throughout the encounters with Phil and, much later, things that were said, gestures that spoke, and laughs and fears that were shared, all continued to reverberate. I wish to share just one of these reverberations here. This one is chosen because it has implications for practices related to futures, in educational sites. Practices breathe life into the logics and styles that together make futures (Anderson, 2010). Many of them are entrenched and mundane, everyday ones that pass by unnoticed: such as writing CVs/resumes and attending careers fairs or drawing up plans for future careers. Phil’s orientation to an apocalyptic future meant that he participated in these practices in critical and unanticipated, even subversive ways that generated alternatives. This was a meanwhile moment illustrative of how we can be released from the ‘inertia of everyday routines’ (Braidotti, 2011, 297).

3.9.1  The Curriculum Vitae The practice of composing a CV, resume, or biodata, as it is known in different parts of the world, is well established and unavoidable. They are artefacts with information about our pasts that are meant to be instrumental in shaping our futures. Software applications offer templates and designs to help create ‘standout’ CVs. Educational sites/institutions direct considerable attention to helping students write them. Careers departments of schools and universities run specialised sessions on writing CVs hold ‘amnesty’ weeks for improving them and offer one-to-one tutorials to shape CVs for particular types of careers. The CV is thus both a product and a practice of education itself. It requires specific skills, demands particular investments, and can open possibilities for the future.

3.9 Meanwhile…

57

Metcalfe (1992) has analysed them as taking on different functions – as a confessional text, akin to a psychoanalytic session, a diary or even a religious confession. In the crafting of a CV, one begins to learn to see oneself in terms of ‘market value’, and thus an exemplar of ‘subjectification’. It is equally a tool of introspection, meditation, and therapy, but a highly regulated one, with strict rules about how much to reveal, what to conceal, and how to obfuscate. So it is also a fabulation that conceals, exaggerates, and emphasises and which can be reshaped differently for a whole variety of job opportunities. That such a shapeshifting document is also simultaneously treated as an earnest and highly valued one should be a source of bafflement. But perhaps its entrenched status and surprising qualities can provide new openings for renewed practices of the future. …The CV is a persuasive, coherent and emotionally charged story of our lives. An initiation to live as if we were born as future wage-labourers. It isn’t the only story we tell and some people find it more powerful than others, but it is always one of the available stories for all wage-labourers. (Metcalfe, 1992, 640)

Metcalfe’s quote raises a multitude of questions: If it were even possible to reimagine curriculum vitaes – ‘life courses’ – beyond a wage labouring perspective, then what would they look like and how could we create them? What purposes would they/could they serve? Can we have CVs that display life courses for collaborative survival? If the narrative is not that of the single, segregated, wage labourer, then what stories could a CV contain? Could they be crafted to reflect assemblies of human and non-human actors that make up our life courses? What could be the educational purposes and learning outcomes of such exercises? Can they be repurposed as a practice for co-evolution, a document that engineers and acknowledges a certain kind of collaborative becoming? Can logics, programmes, and policies change to accommodate such CV writing? The apocalyptic imaginary played an influential role in how Phil oriented himself towards the future. He was not immune to the pressures from family and school to act in ways that created a good CV. As mentioned previously, his efforts to populate his CV in his final years of school consisted of completing activities towards a Duke of Edinburgh award. He knew that participation in such extracurricular activities would help his CV ‘stand out’ and he would be able to demonstrate his ambition to develop himself in a well-rounded manner. In the UK and across the Commonwealth nations, the Duke of Edinburgh awards hold a prestigious status. They are a youth achievement award that promotes a range of skills and activities for young people and also hopes to enhance CVs and employability profiles https:// www.dofe.org/about-­us-­2/. The website notes that ‘achieving a DofE Award is a passport to a brighter future, valued by employers and universities’. There are many awards sections to suit different interests of young people – volunteering, physical, skills, expedition, and residential. The physical award, for instance, could be a way of focusing on health and fitness: ‘As long as you pick something that requires a sustained level of energy and physical activity, the possibilities are endless’. Phil had chosen to work on archery skills. To his parents and teachers, it showed commitment to physical activity and sport with all the attendant, desired qualities it

58

3  Part I: Apocalypse

would bestow (discipline, concentration, endurance, resilience, etc.). To Phil, this was also a way of acquiring a survival skill that might feed and perhaps save him during the zombie apocalypse. The development of his curriculum vitae – his life course – was part of his life survival project for the zombie apocalypse. There were two concurrent CVs, a visible one for family, school, university and future employers, and a hidden one for survival at the zombie apocalypse. Phil’s conventional CV addressed matters of employability, enterprise, and citizenship. His hidden CV addressed survival skills. He already knew how to filter water, make a fire, and create a make-shift gas mask, through his design and technology course, and was learning mechanical engineering behind everyday objects (maintaining a bicycle, fixing a watch or radio). Through biology lessons he was interested in how viruses spread and they might be contained. From watching apocalyptic fiction, he had a number of strategies that would help him survive different kinds of apocalypses. He was continually adding to this considerable knowledge by learning archery if he ever needed to hunt and kill. Watching, listening, and studying Phil’s experience suggested the following thinking resource for creating alternative CVs with young people. Can you create a map that includes the different identities and abilities you have and how they come together for you? Child/sibling/carer/friend/cook/neighbour/teammate/pet owner/phone user/cyborg/thrift adviser/reader/dreamer/fashion guru/gardener/digital media creator/activist…. Can you draw a spider or mind map that links different parts of your life? Can you create a CV for pairs or groups of people  – a team CV? What identities and strengths or weaknesses evolve in collaborative units? How would you describe your own and each others’ strengths, skills, and knowledges? What words would you like to be described by? What do you need to do to achieve these descriptors? Who would be best able to help you? Can you write a different CV for different futures and future selves that you imagine? Can you use it as a device to help you think and become different and desired beings?

3.9.2  Career Maps There are other future-related artefacts that have been subjected to a similar re-­ working. In a conversation, artist Stephen Bennet described to me how he and fellow artist Julie Light collaborated to use ideas from speculative design to help facilitate discussions about the future of research culture for the Royal Society https://royalsociety.org/~/media/policy/projects/research-­c ulture-­i mages/the-­ museum-­of-­extraordinary-­objects.pdf. The reason for doing this, the idea was… [to] create some provocations and speculations of the future to sort of ‘jolt’ people into that future. And to get them out of the now. …when we ask people to talk about the future, they tend to talk about the now but with maybe a few flying cars… and it was really to provoke people, mess them up a bit… so we came up with the concept of the Museum of Extraordinary Objects. …we thought this could be like a museum of extraordinarily good objects …that concept got put into 2035. …we created 7 artefacts. I was involved in two of them – the New Career Map and Young’s Translator.

3.9 Meanwhile…

59

The New Career map 2027 (https://www.srgbennett.com/#/research-­culture-­ royal-­society-­1/), created by Stephen Bennett and Liv Bargman, was a way of re-­ imaging academic careers away from the hackneyed metaphor of the career pyramid. While there is a popular sentiment that there are limited career progression opportunities in academia, there is also a sense that leaving academia after a PhD represents failure of a kind. To help find a way out of this impasse and provoke dialogues about different futures, the careers map was devised. In the academic world, the pyramid looms in people’s mind. … This sense that like any pyramid, there are fewer jobs at the top – the implication being that you may not make it, and if you don’t make it, then you’ve failed. Your academic training has gone to waste. So for example if you had a PhD and became a primary school teacher, then that PhD was wasted, or if you had a PhD and went into banking, that was wasted. If you were a PI (Principal Investigator on a research grant), that was the major element of the pathway to the top. So this was the idea – to turn the linear pyramid pathway into a flat world. A globe. No top or bottom. …It’s a continent of overlapping worlds and countries. Like a Pangea – when all continents were squished together.

The map visualises skills like a futuristic Pangea, of overlapping continent and job roles are dotted around the continents like places on a map. The landscape mentions skills such as creative, strategic, collaborative, technical, practical, commercial, teaching/mentoring, communication, managerial, etc. ‘The idea is that everything is close/overlapping. So on the map you have the skills needed and also specific cities/places which are career types’. Career types could be policy fellow, freelance technician, research fellow, founder/CEO, start-up scientific employee, science policy advisor, curator, teaching fellow, outreach officer, research director, professor, etc. …So if you were founder or CEO, you have a set of skills that overlap like managerial skills, strategic skills, commercial skills and collaborative skills, for example. If you’re a free-lance technician, you have practical skills and technical skills… so it’s trying to do a couple of things. … you can move from being a CEO, to a patent lawyer, to going into academia. So you can walk from place to place rather than feeling like you are in a pyramid with only one way to go - up the ladder.

Using transparencies to overlay this map, participants can draw and redraw different career paths/routes. While this creative career map is specific to research careers and used primarily as a device to break away from constricting habits of thinking about such careers, its speculative design resonates with the sorts of fears that circulate around young people’s careers too. Youth Employment UK’s (2019) report on Youth Voice Census claims: There is also a very real sense from young people that they want a job that really suits their talents. Any dream will not do for the young people who responded to our 2019 Youth Voice Census. In an age of personalisation, young people are searching for something that will be a genuinely good fit for them. The challenge? They need the support to help them find that. We are seeing some improvement in the information and choices offered to young people, but they still feel unsupported in navigating what this all means for them as individuals.

60

3  Part I: Apocalypse

Using speculative and creative practices to rethink everyday artefacts of the future such as CVs or career pathways/maps could be a way of re-enchanting both education and re-frame possible futures.

References African Youth Survey. (2020). The rise of afro-optimism. https://ays2020.ichikowitzfoundation.org Anderson, B. (2010). Preemption, precaution, preparedness: Anticipatory action and future geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 34(6), 777–798. Baldy, C. (2014). Why i teach The Walking Dead in my native studies classes, The Nerds of Color, April 24, 2014. https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2014/04/24/why-­i-­teach-­the-­walking-­dead-­in-­my-­ native -­studies-­classes/ Barnardo’s. (2019). Overcoming the poverty of hope. https://www.barnardos.org.uk/ overcoming-­poverty-­hope BBC Radio 4, Open book: Dystopian fiction. 31 December 2017. Berdoy, M., Webster, J.  P., & Macdonald, D.  W. (2000). Fatal attraction in rats infected with Toxoplasma gondii. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 267(1452), 1591–1594. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2000.1182. PMC 1690701. PMID 11007336. Bessire, L. (2011). Apocalyptic futures: The violent transformation of moral human life among Ayoreo-speaking people of the Paraguayan Gran Chaco. American Ethnologist, 38(4), 743–757. Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic theory: The portable Rosi Braidotti. Columbia University Press. Bruhm, S., & Hurley, N. (2004). Curiouser: On the queerness of children. University of Minnesota Press. Bryant, R., & Knight, D. M. (2019). The anthropology of the future. Cambridge University Press. Carey, M. (2019). What is the plural of Apocalypse? An essay on the ends of time. Terrain [En ligne], 71 | avril 2019, https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/18606 Children’s Society. (2019). The good childhood report. https://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/sites/ default/files/the_good_childhood_report_2019.pdf Claeys, G. (2016). Dystopia: A natural history. Oxford University Press. Colebrook, C. (2014). Death of the post-human: Essays on extinction. Vol 1. Open Humanities Press. Coleman, R., & Tutton, R. (2017). Introduction to special issue of sociological review on ‘futures in question: Theories, methods, practices’. The Sociological Review, 65(3), 440–447. Devine, D. (2018). Working paper: The UK referendum on membership of the European Union as a Trigger Event for Hate Crimes, SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=3118190 Eckersley, R. (1992). Youth and the challenge to change. Bringing youth and society together in the new millennium. Apocalypse No. Eckersley, R. (1995). Values and visions: Youth and the failure of modern Western culture. Youth Studies Australia, 14(1), 13. Eckersley, R. (1996). Dreams and expectations: Young Australians’ views of the future. Youth Studies Australia, 15(3), 11. Eckersley, R. (1998). Redefining progress: Shaping the future to human needs. Family Matters, 51, 6–12. Eckersley, R. (1999). Dreams and expectations: Young people’s expected and preferred futures and their significance for education. Futures, 31, 73–90. Fahy, T. (Ed.). (2010). The philosophy of horror. The University Press of Kentucky. Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. John Hunt Publishing.

References

61

Gross, L. (2002). The comic vision of Anishinaabe culture and religion. The American Indian Quarterly, 26(3), 436–459. https://doi.org/10.1353/aiq.2003.0038 Hannan, D., Hövels, B., Van den Berg, S., & White, M. (1995). ‘Early leavers’ from education and training in Ireland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. European Journal of Education, 30(3), 325–346. Haraway, D.  J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Harrison, J. (2019). Posthumanist readings in dystopian young adult fiction: Negotiating the nature/culture divide. Lexington Books. Heywood, P. (2017). The ontological turn. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. https:// www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/ontological-­turn Hicks, D. (1996). A lesson for the future: Young people’s hopes and fears for tomorrow. Futures, 28(1), 1–13. Hicks, D. (2012). The future only arrives when things look dangerous: Reflections on futures education in the UK. Futures, 44(1), 4–13. Higonnet, A. (1998). Pictures of innocence: The history and crisis of ideal childhood. Thames and Hudson Ltd.. Hurley, J., & Jemisin, N.  K. (2018). An apocalypse is a relative thing: An interview with NK Jemisin. ASAP/Journal, 3(3), 467–477. https://doi.org/10.1353/asa.2018.0035 Hurley, J., & Sinikin, D. (2018). Apocalypse: Introduction. Project Muse, ASAP Journal, 3(3), 451–466. https://doi.org/10.1353/asa.2018.0034 Hutchinson, F. (1992). Making peace with people and planet: Some important lessons from the Gandhian tradition in educating for the 21st century. Peace, Environment and Education, 3(3), 3–14. Ipsos. (2018). Goalkeepers global youth outlook report. https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ ct/news/documents/2018-­09/gates_ipsos_topline_report_09_24_2018.pdf Ispos. (2016). African youth survey. https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/2016-­08/African_ Youth_2016-­P2.pdf Johnson, L. (1987). Children’s visions of the future. Futurist, 21(3), 36–40. Jonsson, G., Sarri, C., & Alerby, E. (2012). Too hot for the reindeer  – Voicing sámi children ́s visions of the future. In International research in geographical and environmental education. Multilingual Matters. Levitas, R. (2017). Where there is no vision, the people perish: A utopian ethic for a transformed future. Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Property. http://cusp.ac.uk/essay/m1-­5 Lidstone, J., & Stoltman, P. (2007). Editorial: Sustainable environments or sustainable cultures. Research priorities. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 16(1), 1–4. Lipsitz, G. (2006). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. Temple University Press. Lysgaard, J. A., Bengtsson, S., & Laugesen, M. H. L. (2019). Dark pedagogy: Education, horror and the Anthropocene. Springer. MacLure, M., Jones, L., Holmes, R., & MacRae, C. (2012). Becoming a problem: Behaviour and reputation in the early years classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 38(3), 447–471. Merick, R. (2017, August 1). https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-­ latest-­l eave-­voters-­u k-­e conomy-­d amage-­y ougov-­o lder-­p ensioners-­l osing-­j obs-­i ncome-­ taxes-­a7870871.html Metcalfe, A. W. (1992). The curriculum vitae: Confessions of a wage-labourer. Work, Employment and Society, 6(4), 619–641. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. University of Minnesota Press. Moylan, T. (2000). Scraps of the untainted sky: Science fiction, utopia, dystopia. Westview Press. Nelson, A. (2002). Future texts. Social Text, 71(2), 1–15.

62

3  Part I: Apocalypse

Nickel, P. (2010). Horror and the idea of everyday life: On skeptical threats in psycho and the birds. In T. Fahy (Ed.), The philosophy of horror (pp. 33–41). The University Press of Kentucky. Nordensvard, J. (2014). Dystopia and disutopia: Hope and hopelessness in German pupils’ future narratives. Journal of Educational Change, 15(4), 443–465. Ojala, M. (2007). Hope and worry: Exploring young people’s values, emotions, and behaviour regarding global environmental problems. In Örebro studies in psychology 11. Örebro University. Opinium. (2019). https://www.opinium.co.uk/racism-­rising-­since-­brexit-­vote/ Persson, L., Lundegård, I., & Wickman, P.-O. (2011). Worry becomes hope in education for sustainable development. Utbildning & Demokrati, 20(1), 123–144. Pope, R. (2011). Hooked on an affect: Detroit techno and dystopian digital culture. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 2(1), 24–44. Preston, J. (2010). White apocalypse: Preparedness pedagogies as symbolic and material invocations of White supremacy. In J. Sandlin, B. Schultz, & J. Burdick (Eds.), Handbook of public pedagogy: Education and learning beyond schooling (pp. 555–563). Routledge. Prince’s Trust Youth Index. (2019). The Prince’s trust tenth youth index. https://www.princes-­trust. org.uk/document_youthindex_2019.pdf Priyadharshini, E. (2011). Counter narratives in ‘naughty’students’ accounts: Challenges for the discourse of behaviour management. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(1), 113–129. Priyadharshini, E. (2019). Anticipating the apocalypse: Monstrous educational futures. Futures, 113(2019), 102453. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102453 Rahm, L., & Skågeby, J. (2016). Preparing for monsters: Governance by popular culture. The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 1(15), 76–95. Roanhorse, R. (2018). Postcards from the Apocalypse, Uncanny Magazine, https://uncannymagazine.com/article/postcards-­from-­the-­apocalypse/ Savransky, M., Wilkie, A., & Rosengarten, M. (2017). The lure of possible futures: On Speculative Research. In A. Wilkie, M. Savransky, & M. Rosengarten (Eds.), Speculative research: The lure of possible futures (pp. 1–18). Taylor & Francis. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. (2019). Counterfuturisms and speculative temporalities: Walking research-creation in school. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32(6), 547–559. Thunberg, G. (2019). No one is too small to make a difference. Penguin UK. Trimble, S. (2012). Undead ends: Stories of apocalypse. Rutgers University Press. Villanen, H., & Jonsson, G. (2013). Envisioning the future: A question of distances. International Electronic Journal of Environmental Education, 3(1), 1–16. Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998). Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4, 469–488. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2003). And : after-dinner speech given at anthropology and science, the 5th decennial conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth. University of Manchester. Wilkie, A., Savransky, M., & Rosengarten, M. (Eds.). (2017). Speculative research: The lure of possible futures. Taylor & Francis. Wilson, N. (1989). The state of the planet and young people’s minds. In R.  Slaughter (Ed.), Studying the future: An introductory reader (pp.  36–41). Commission for the future and Australian Bicentennial Futures Education Project. Youth Employment UK. (2019). Youth voice census report. https://www.youthemployment.org. uk/youth-­voice-­census/

Chapter 4

Part II: Revolution

Starting with the notion of ‘wresting control from the elders’ as a defining feature of the imaginary of revolution, this part of the book examines how the school climate strikes (SCS) of 2019–2020 enacts this orientation, in being a youth activist movement attempting to draw attention to the ongoing climate apocalypse. This section examines data on the profile, scale, and mobilisation of young strikers in this emerging movement and considers the unique combinations of old and new coalitions, media use, and ways of organising for action that constitute contemporary youth activisms. This allows a consideration of the clear departures of this movement from dominant concerns and preoccupations voiced in existing literature on youth activism. The response from authorities to the movement is also critically discussed as a way of drawing attention to the treatment of the category of youth. The section ends with an analysis of the images of and messages on the handwritten placards of school strikers across the globe to allow a reading of these acts as acts of public pedagogy. The distinct pedagogies of this imaginary as embodied through the movement lie in the expanded notions of the public, and the attempts to cultivate of new aesthetic for the post-Anthropocene. two members of her uni squad, the Unfuckwithables, are seated either side of her, Waris and Courtney, hard workers like her because they’re all determined to get good degrees because without it they’re stuffed they’re all stuffed anyway, they agree when they leave uni it’s gonna be with a huge debt and crazy com-petition for jobs and the outrageous rental prices out there mean her generation will have to move back home forever, which will lead to even more of them despairing at the future and what with the planet about to go shit with the United Kingdom soon to be disunited from Europe which itself is hurtling down the reactionary road and making fascism fashionable again and it’s so crazy that the disgusting perma-tanned billionaire has set a new intellectual and moral low by being president of America and basically it all means that the older generation has RUINED EVERYTHING and her generation is doooooomed unless they wrest intellectual control from their elders sooner rather than later. Girl, Woman, Other (Bernadine Evaristo)

Taking inspiration from the quote above, which shifts from an apocalyptic tone to one of revolutionary potential, I want to focus on the youthful inclination of © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 E. Priyadharshini, Pedagogies for the Post-Anthropocene, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5788-7_4

63

64

4  Part II: Revolution

‘wresting intellectual control from the elders’. Of course, categories of ‘youth’ and ‘elders’ are not at all homogeneous. They are both heuristic devices and problematic ones that can be easily pressed into the service of a ‘singular narrative’ that could propogate unproblematic standpoints in complex times. Nevertheless, Evaristo’s characters capture a popular mood, one that has repeatedly surfaced in my own fieldwork and in national youth surveys in the UK (reported in the previous section on Apocalypse), and therefore deserving of a closer look. If we accept that ‘wresting’ suggests a degree of struggle – a snatching, wrenching, seizing, or grabbing – then we must also recognise discord, disagreement, and how the idea of ‘wresting intellectual control from the elders’ is charged with action and emotion which contains hope and fear – for both young and old. They are the dominant and complementary emotions associated with the imaginary of ‘revolution’. Studying with the school climate strike movement reveals those teaching-learning moments embedded in the imaginary of Revolution. Revolutions in the archetypal sense are usually envisioned as dramatic and as bringing about a sea-change within short, intense periods, like the October Revolution. But the word also describes slower, longer yet substantial, systemic change like the Industrial Revolution. The principle of substantive transformation of life itself, triggered by social, religious, or economic systems is central to the idea and has characterised the world’s major revolutions – the Communist Revolutions in Russia, China, and Cuba and the French, Haitian, Iranian, and Velvet revolutions too. In the tussle between old and new, newness is, most often, painfully and forcefully introduced into the timeline of societies through revolution. The dominant imagery of revolutions is of banners and crowds, rallying calls and manifestos, mass action in the form of civil disobedience or violent protest, and also of charismatic leadership. They have tended to involve the death and/or destruction of people and property and certainly an upending of the old order. Thus ‘revolution’ takes us further than dissent or resistance, though they are often the essential seeds of a revolution. They are loaded with affective drivers of action – anger, fear, despair, hope, longing, determination, and much more. But mostly, revolution takes us into territories of substantive, systemic change that demand a price. I want to examine how these features of revolution – action and affect – are part of imagining alternative futures, and the lessons that the youthful revolutionary imaginary holds. To do this, I focus on the specific movement of the school climate strikes (SCS) of 2019–2020, also known as Fridays for Future (FFF) that brought together the key ingredients of young people, schooling, civil disobedience, and an articulation of a desire for ‘system change’ to ensure liveable futures. This was a movement that was protesting for their/our/planetary futures. The act of protest here is about educating ourselves of the need for change and to embody that spirit of change, to create that change towards making new and alternative futures. I want to explore these questions: What was happening during these school climate strikes? what kinds and levels of actions comprised it? How did the imaginary fuel different orientations and actions? Can we read the actions as an attempt to ‘wrest intellectual control from the elders’, perhaps even occupy the moral high ground? What are the pedagogies arising out of this particular revolution?

4.1  Studying the Movement

65

4.1  Studying the Movement I have been studying the movement for over a year (2019–2020) and followed it closely on new and old media and observed the spectacle of the Friday strikes in person. I have, on a fortnightly basis, scoured various media sites/platforms and assembled a collection of arresting ‘moments’. These moments are those that have evoked some significant response in me – often shock, wonder, anger, curiosity, sadness, hope, or laughter. These are indeed moments of affect, moments that affected me and moved me. This is also a process that is not without personal remorse, as they raised from memory, my despair, and hope as a teenager in 1980s India, when I first became aware of a brewing ecological crisis. There were innumerable actions and solutions then, which, if adapted/adopted, could have already allowed a change of course for economies, societies, and ecologies in the present and for generations to come. Not much happened. Actions, if taken, were feeble and certainly affected little change. There were few mobilisations that changed the public mood, nor actions at the scale at which they were needed. Thinking with this movement is also an attempt to understand how, at this particular moment, this specific generational cohort has been moved to mobilise and substantially increase public awareness of the urgency of the climate crisis and the need to act. The school climate strike movement is treated here, as a moment of cultural, aesthetic, and educational significance. It was/is a mosaic of young people, emotions, actions, public debate, and media use – each tile of this mosaic is different and yet together, it makes for an arresting subject of study. I chose not to interview young people in the movement as part of the enquiry. There have been conversations with many of them but no set of research questions that needed their response. Interviewing individuals or holding focus groups would be more of an explication/ validation of the meanings and messages that poured out from the movement. I was interested in the phenomena at a different scale – the scale of the global movement, the scale of the mass of young bodies and distinctive singularity of the message they were proclaiming. To do this, I have drawn on the work of teams of researchers across Europe who have been collecting data about the scale and profile of the protests in Europe. I look at three aspects of the movement – the scale and profile of the strikes, the websites and social media accounts of a few key organisations, and the ‘spectacle’ of the Friday strikes. Within each, I look at ‘moments’ of significance or new insight. There is a striking photograph1 of young girls holding up placards at a climate strike in New Delhi. The placard in the middle, like all others observed at the climate strikes, is hand drawn and handmade. It says, ‘The third eye is opening’ and is accompanied by a child/young person’s illustration of a face with three open eyes, the third placed sideways on the forehead. In Hinduism, the third eye opening signals a moment of new consciousness/awareness, a significant moment of enlightenment. This seems a good way of describing my choice of ‘moments’ to dwell on, in  https://images.app.goo.gl/LrN54ASjtFBxpqqZ8 Last accessed Aug 7, 2020

1

66

4  Part II: Revolution

this part of the book: they raised difficult, unsettling, and confrontational questions for myself and the wider field of education. In one way or another, they opened the third eye. I focus on some of these ‘third eye-opening’ moments here. I have juxtaposed these ‘moments’ with reactions of authorities, observations from media reports, and contrasts with research literature on youth activism. As in the previous section on Apocalypse, the movement between disparate sources of information and perspective allows for an argument to form, about the youthful imaginary of revolution.

4.2  Scale and Profile of School Climate Strikes (SCS) The school climate strikes (2019–2020) are an ongoing global movement of school children who withdraw their presence from school on a nominated day/time to draw attention to the climate crisis. It is an act of rebellion if not revolution, as children/ young people are obliged by law or at least by custom and practice to stay in school until the school-leaving age. This is part of our societal expectation, tied to particular beliefs about education and the future: that schooling is how we best equip ourselves for the future. Of the many purported aims of schooling, those of developing the young human, the citizen, the employee, entrepreneur, or artist of the future are enduring. Thus, to leave the school premises during the working week signals open rebellion and disruptive intent. It is an act loaded with intentionality, purpose, and a distinct message and, as such, shares little with more familiar acts of personal rebellion such as bunking/truancy. The school climate strikes (SCS), sometimes called the Fridays for Future (FFF) movement, started off as a regular, Friday afternoon strike. It then became more common to find the global network of strikers across the five continents coordinating their strikes to more spectacular effect on specific Fridays or over a particular week. As a strategy for visibility in the press, this made more sense – it ensured larger crowds and held the media/public interest better. The statistics surrounding the school climate strikes attest to its reach – in 2019, global strikes were called in March, May, and during the ‘Global Week for Future’ strikes from September 20 to 27. The largest of these in September 2019 is said to have gathered around 4 million strikers worldwide, largely populated by school children but often accompanied by striking workers and older climate activists too (1.4 million workers are said to have joined school strikers in September 2019 in Germany for instance). The September 2019 strike alone may have covered 4500 separate strikes in over 150 countries (Barclay & Resnik, 2019; Laville & Watts, 2019). Alongside these special strikes, school strikers have never stopped their more mundane and less visible, weekly strikes on every working Friday afternoon. Although the story of these strikes tends to coalesce around the ‘origin’ narrative featuring Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist, this is easily challenged. For example, an earlier Global Climate Strike by students was first proposed and

4.2  Scale and Profile of School Climate Strikes (SCS)

67

held in 2015,2 with the support of similar organisations as today (Avaaz and 350. org). Youth/child climate activism by and with indigenous populations also has a long and rich, if under-reported, history, such as the work of the UK Tar Sands Network3 co-founded by Suzanne Dhaliwal, or the 9-year-old Ridhima Pandey who sued the Indian government in 2017 for failing to address climate change. The 2019 wave of strikes could not have crested without the momentum of these previous acts, movements, organisations, and histories. 2019 was the year it went ‘viral’ – with the largest turnouts and as a globally visible movement covered widely by traditional media. It was finally a spectacle that caught public and media attention. The outbreak of COVID-19 had a dampening effect on the movement, shifting it online through 2020 and 2021. Schools themselves had to shut down over significant portions of 2020 and mass gatherings were discouraged for public health reasons. The visibility of the movement and indeed the momentum it had secured with getting its core message across slowed down, with coverage falling off the news agenda. Admittedly, there was a surfeit of news in 2020 with COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests taking centre stage. The school strikes continued to operate online with # ClimateStrikeOnline and #DigitalStrike alongside #StayAtHome and #flattenthecurve. Tweets were accompanied with photos of young schoolers holding placards from their bedrooms or gardens, presenting themselves as striking from school work, albeit from home, on Friday afternoons. Needless to say, this did not have the same sense of revolution – rebellion and spectacle – or indeed the media coverage that the more raucous mass walks-outs from schools produced. Strikers from the movement appeared to have responded to the other ongoing global protest movements, with a greater, more visible discussion of ‘intersectional environmentalism’, ‘climate justice activism’, and the need for better education on structural racism on their social media feeds. Research on the composition of Friday school strikers in 13 European cities and their mobilisation (Wahlström et al., 2019) suggested that 2019 was indeed the landmark year for a new generation of climate activists and ‘the possible development of FFF as a broader, grassroots movement, with a strong female presence and reliance on social media and peer networks’ (2019, 5). This grassroots movement of peers and social media networks was also unusual in its ‘limited commitment to established environmental organisations’ (2019, 5). Reflecting the gender of the movement’s leaders in many of the countries, the protests were strongly dominated by women – particularly among school students (66.4%). The survey also indicates that school students attending the demonstrations came from well-educated family backgrounds with 71.3% of them having at least one parent with a university degree. For some commentators, this dominance of activists from middle-class backgrounds has reduced the significance of such protest with the movement being mocked as ‘the protest of the privileged’. However, that such criticism has also largely tended to come from the white, middle classed and middle aged (Longley, 2019) had

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GjdVgGfcb8  https://no-tar-sands.org/what-are-the-tar-sands/

2 3

68

4  Part II: Revolution

resulted in the movement being seen through the frame of the ‘culture wars’. It is worth examining some of the arguments emerging in a little detail. Climate change is well known as an ‘abstract’ issue, that is, its effects may be experienced as all-encompassing, but as slow, long term, and lacking a symbol or powerful iconography (similar to the mushroom cloud that stood for annihilation through nuclear war) that can message its immediate relevance to all life and matter on the planet. There are also no simple sound bites that can convey the full horror of the scale and reach of climate change. Amitav Ghosh (2016) describes this ‘lack’ as contributing to our inability to grasp the magnitude of the problem, itself labelled the ‘great derangement’ of humanity. It may be that the idea that a group of school goers could possibly have grasped the ungraspable is itself hard to comprehend. However, it is for the apparently insurmountable attributes of climate change – too big, too nebulous, too hard to solve – that school strikes seem an effective strategy, particularly in terms of securing media coverage and for insisting that the issue must be faced. Protesting for something that is salient to all life yet feels less immediately tangible than say child poverty/deprivation or zero hour employment contracts raises questions of motive and gives rise to bad faith interpretations of strikers’ interests. The absence of racial and socio-economic diversity among the climate protest movement as a whole has rightly drawn attention. The tactics of older environmental protestors from, for instance, the Extinction Rebellion movement, which involves courting arrest by the police, disrupting everyday commutes/life and then facing a racially inequal law and justice system have been noted as strategies that do not resonate with black and minority ethnic protestors (Akec, 2019). However, by contrast, there appears to be greater presence of minority activists in the school strike movement, at least in the UK (Murray & Mohdin, 2020), many of whom insist on not de-linking movements for racial and climate justice. At the same time, while school strikes were a global phenomena, media coverage in the West tended to focus on the protests in economically richer nations, and on white child protagonists. However, digital platforms such as Twitter and Instagram have been used by young activists to counter mass media’s obsession with white European activists. When Vanessa Nakate, the Ugandan activist, was cropped out of a photograph of strikers (Evelyn, 2020), the moment sparked efforts to make more visible, youth of colour who were already an active part of the movement. It also became a moment that exposed the white orientated organisation of mass media that had consistently overlooked the efforts of black, ethnic minority and indigenous activists’ efforts for environmental justice. The discussion about the invisibility of non-white protestors in the marches also needs to take into account scholarship by black eco-critical scholars (Wright, 2018; Davis et al., 2019) who have pointed to the historical and ongoing rupture in indigenous and black people’s relationships to land and nature which are indelibly affected by slavery, colonialism, and global capitalism. This suggests that the ‘activisms’ of different communities and youth are unlikely to resemble each other. Past research on digital activism claims that minorities are active in online campaigns (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015), but still less active than whites overall (Best & Krueger,

4.3  Youth Activism and Organisation

69

2005), and that when one broadens the lens to a wider participatory politics, this is not the case (Cohen et al., 2012). All of this suggests that different forms of living and acting are differently visible rather than absent. There is also a slippage when discussing the specifics of the older and younger climate change movements which remain allied yet distinct. Such complexity and nuance can be ignored in blanket descriptions of the various climate change movements. This is not to suggest that the SCS movement is above reproach. There may be issues of strategy that the movement may wish to examine, such as the overwhelming focus on global warming and reduction of carbon emissions compared to nature-based arguments such as a good life for all species (Richardson, 2019). However, the moves to locate these activisms as a part of the culture wars (liberal, white, middle class women’s interests) and thus as suspect are risible. The increasingly loud demands for system change to meets social justice needs of peoples and beings at a planetary level also suggest that more established leftist objections to lifestyles associated with capitalist consumption are not delinked from the environmental concerns of strikers. Wahlstrom et al. (2019) claim that the specific features – strong female presence, reliance on social media as well as peer networks, limited commitment to established organisations, investment in lifestyle politics (but a varying interpretation of how important these are for achieving social change), and, above all, a hopeful attitude towards the future – point towards the possible development of SCS into a grassroots movement that could significantly broaden the composition of climate protest. They also note that it would be unwise either to dismiss SCS as an ephemeral trend built on a personality cult (Greta Thunberg’s) or on a popular media-­ centred movement prone to quick dissolutions. Perhaps focusing away from the organisation and profile of the movement itself and more on the lessons/messages of youth participating in it would offer another way to understand this youth movement. I also want to use this idea as an entry point into a discussion of the danger of misrecognition of youth and their actions if scholars mainly recognise the more traditional formations and organisations of protest/activist movements. In the next few pages I will draw attention to scholarly literature and its concerns about youth, youth activism, media-based activism, and organisations’ response as a way of making my point about misrecognition. I do this to point out that there is room to be more relational and affective in our research engagements with youth. By this I mean, undertake a ‘studying with’ approach using youth movements such as SCS as study companions to learn from as much as learn about.

4.3  Youth Activism and Organisation The nature of the school climate strikes, their scale and passion, seems to be at odds with frequently voiced concerns around disappointments surrounding youth participation in the public sphere as citizens or as activists, as discussed in some of the

70

4  Part II: Revolution

pre-2019 literature. There is some history to the criticisms that children and youth are not treated as full members of ‘the public’, that they are ‘dependents’ or ‘wards’ of elders (Dewey, 1927). They are seen as not fully-paid up members of the category ‘human’. Hickey-Moody’s (2016) work on child/youth engagement with the arts and creative fields provides a strong critique and a counter theorisation to this through the concept of ‘little publics’ which allows a recognition of young people’s acts as civic actions. I wish to draw on these critical sensibilities but, as in earlier sections, propose that we strategically view the category of youth as alien, unfamiliar, and other, as a device to further dismantle the ‘human’ rather than rehabilitate them within the category. I wish to do this by first noting the many ways they are positioned as outsiders already. Some earlier research literature is preoccupied by worries of a decline in youth activism and a concern that youth seem less involved (than previous generations in the US or UK) with traditional/institutional politics, while post-2000 literature focuses more on emergent forms of youth participatory politics (Jenkins, 2016). The energy and vibrancy of the Friday strikes certainly challenges older concerns around participation and activism and shows how participatory culture in concert with social media meets political and civic activism. These forms of activism are unlike traditional methods of joining political parties or organisations. They use new mechanisms, are more playful (e.g. as evidenced through TikTok videos or Instagram posts) and push back against older political organisation and activism in unusual and creative ways. A distinct worry expressed by some scholars of youth activism has been that low youth participation in social movement organisations would lead to less activism and that there has been a growing distance in recent years between professional activists in these organisations and the vast grassroots. The concern was that youth were not being ‘socialized’ into activism (Earl et al., 2017; Elliott & Earl, 2018). The underpinning belief is that youth are more likely to participate in politics/activism if supported by elders – particularly teachers/family members to develop a civic imagination (Flanagan, 2013; Kennelly, 2011; Lovell, 2003; Sullivan & Tranuse, 1999). Dewey (1927) has written of how the young need to be ‘brought within’ the associated communities by means of education, a learning of how to be part of communities. In contrast, the SCS movement shows that young people prefer other routes to developing as an activist beyond being socialized by teachers or receiving knowledge about political activism that is ‘passed down’ from older movements and generations. If anything, the school strikers seem disillusioned with how ineffective previous generations have been in instigating system change, and in this sense their reluctance to join older forms of organising and acting seems a logical response. There appears to be no belief in an ‘appropriate’ way of being socialized into activism, and older generations who acted in a landscape free of digital media may struggle to comprehend the new mechanisms of activism, or see them as forms of armchair/weak activism. Discourses of ‘digital natives’ and hierarchisations of ‘online’ versus ‘offline’ acts contribute to these problems of recognition. Wahlström et al.’s (2019) research shows how school students in FFF demonstrations rarely supported political parties (or their youth organizations) and also very

4.3  Youth Activism and Organisation

71

rarely contacted politicians or government officials. ‘While 24.2% of the adults had had contact with a politician or government official, this was true for only 10% of the school students’ (2019, 11). Perhaps this is entirely predictable given the age and preoccupations of school goers who would not see officials or authorities as their main port of call. However, 68.2% of them claimed to be quite or very interested in politics. This suggests that while climate change may be viewed by young people as capable of being addressed through traditional political parties or even through (non-governmental) organisational politics, their desire to organise and to be involved in what is a political cause is not necessarily through these routes. The salience of peers for youth activism seems greater in Wahlström et  al.’s (2019) survey. School strikers attach more importance to their peers than adults. Firstly, the proportion of lone demonstrators among school students (less than 3% on average) was significantly less than the proportion among adults (around 20%). Secondly, family ties seem to emerge as secondary in the mobilization process: ‘They are hardly mentioned as an important information channel and relatively few school students demonstrated together with a parent or family member (no more than 10% across all cities, with the exception of the Belgian and UK cases)’ (2019, 14). The demonstrations were also unusual in that the share of newcomers who were participating in a demonstration for the first time averaged around 38% across the countries. Previous research had shown a much lower average of 10%, suggesting that the population of demonstrators (for whatever cause) in the past has been drawn from a more or less stable pool of the population. Above all, these strikes have been unusual in that they seem to be rooted in schools. Wahlstrom et al.’s survey shows that peer-to-peer ‘invites’ to join the strikes played a significant part in mobilisation. Equally interesting is the fact that there were rather more inviters than invitees: 72.4% of surveyed school students personally asked someone else to join them in demonstrating at the Global Climate Strike. For adults, this share is lower, but still high at 56.3%. Relatively more demonstrators are thus recruiters themselves, rather than (solely) being a recruit. Recruiters were mostly those who did not receive a personal invitation themselves: 67.9% of all recruiters had not personally been asked by someone else. Most recruiters are thus starting an interpersonal invitation chain, rather than extending an invitation. (Wahlström et al., 2019, 12)

This suggests that many young people felt compelled enough to initiate conversations and invitations rather than just joining their friends out of social pressure. However, such large scale inviting and being invited taking place in the context of school environments and shared classes can indeed create an environment where social pressure continues to play a part. What is also interesting is that the report suggests that young people chose to invite those from their school rather than from a non-school-related (wider social network) contacts. Thus, the dynamism of the strikes drew its energy primarily from being located in school communities, within specific institutions and network of school-based contacts. Of the invitees, 70.5% were invited by one or more of their friends (p.  12). Teachers and parents seem to have played some small part with

72

4  Part II: Revolution

16.8% of school students claiming to have received a personal invitation to the demonstration by a teacher and 14.5% claiming to have been invited by their parents. Personal invitation and recruitment also seems to have played a much bigger role than old and new media in publicising the events: while 23.4% of adults in the marches had learnt about the event through an impersonal channel, such as newspapers, advertisements, radio, or TV, less than 11% of school students said the same. About 34.4% of school students and 31.6% of adults indicated having learnt about the protest through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram (but not personal messaging). These figures from the survey suggest that the strikes had an unusually high resonance with school goers and that conversations among classmates and peers in school had played a much larger role than usual in mobilising their numbers. There were more first-time demonstrators than usual, and local school-based mobilisation seems to have combined with global, social network-based communications to yield large numbers of demonstrators. Such combinations forming youth communities and networks are a new development and worthy of more in-depth research that ought to resume when strikers return to the streets again.

4.4  Organisational Websites and Social Media Earl, Maher, and Elliott, writing in 2017, propose that social movement organisations that wish to draw in younger activists must pay better attention to their digital presence, particularly to their websites which do not seem to recognise or acknowledge youth as a relevant or important constituency. They are simply not geared to engage youth and offer few attractive invitations for participation in advocacy activities. They note a mismatch between online opportunities and what youth seem to want. Most sites, they note, do not engage in identity bridging, that is, they do not offer sufficiently desirable reasons for young people’s identity-related needs. However this approach sounds like a marketing challenge, where organisations need to create a need in youth and then offer ways to satisfy it. By contrast, the school climate strikes evidence a youth-based movement with a plethora of organisations, digital sites, and media that are predominantly run for young people by young people. For instance, the UKSCN (UK School Climate Network) website opens a Climate Quest page4 for children/young people to sign in with a fun username (such as Distinctive Wheat, Blue Iguana, Mountain Rabbit) attached to a futuristic looking, robot-like avatar. Once the avatar is chosen, the game reveals a dashboard of ‘social sharing actions’. As users complete actions, they receive points to unlock new challenges. The aim is to extend each user’s reach to earn more points. These kinds of sites are also clear about their purpose and the nature of their demands on society and politicians. Of the three large organisations involved in

 https://ukscn.org/climate-quest/dashboard/distinctive-wheat-7519

4

4.4  Organisational Websites and Social Media

73

youth strikes in the UK, Fridays for Future5 specify demands that relate to the Paris Agreement and the IPCC reports, particularly pressuring governments and organisations to work to keep global temperature rise around 1.5 °C; insisting that equity and climate justice are linked; and asking to always ‘unite behind the science’. The UK Student Climate Network (UKSCN)6 defines their demands more broadly as: Save the Future, Tell the Future, Teach the Future and Empower the Future. They also campaign for the Youth Vote, to press for legislation for those between 16 and 18 years to vote. Extinction Rebellion Youth7 which aims to attract those born after 1990 (as a distinction from Extinction Rebellion which involves older activists) demand that governments tell the truth, act now, and create and be led by a citizen’s assembly on climate and ecological justice. These are but three major youth-led organisations in a vibrant field, but all place urgent structural change from governments at the top of their agenda. This makes for a remarkable degree of ‘message discipline’ across the various organisers of school strikes even if the demands are overwhelmingly structural change-oriented, focused on scientific evidence around global temperature control and less on the possibilities or the gains of how green/ good lives may be experienced (Richardson, 2019). The role of social media in social and protest movements is an ever-expanding area of research and it is worth considering some of the salient findings alongside the school climate strikes movement too. For example, questions of whether social media can act as a catalyst for political action – as recruitment tool and as an energising force; whether social media supplants face-to-face organising or traditional media; fears of dependency on digital media’s features such as virality/trending which can potentially destabilise or dissolve social movements when virality disappears; and concerns around ‘becoming recognisable’ to algorithms to sustain the visible presence of movements etc., abound in the literature in this field (Lotan, 2011; Gillespie, 2014; Youmans & York, 2012; Poell & van Dijck, 2018; Poell, 2020) and are at least tangentially of interest in terms of their relevance to the SCS. It is now well established that on Twitter, trending topics/hashtags are not reliant on a systematic rise in volume of tweets but on sharp spikes: The algorithm adapts over time, based on the changing velocity of the usage of the given term in tweets. If we see a systematic rise in volume, but no clear spike, it is possible that the topic will never trend. (Lotan, 2011)

Because the technological architecture and business models of platforms are geared towards virality, they can generate moments of ‘togetherness’ which are both a ‘blessing and a curse’ as they can bind together large volumes of people but the ties can dissolve when the platforms shift to the next trending topics, and collectivity disaggregates in the process (Juris, 2012). This tension between community building and commercial interests makes us cautious about the ephemeral nature of ‘communities’ in the social media environment (Poell & van Dijck, 2018, 11).  http://fridaysforfuture.org  https://ukscn.org/our-demands/ 7  https://www.xryouth.org/about 5 6

74

4  Part II: Revolution

Another concern in the literature is the effort that canny users of social media need to expend to become ‘recognizable to an algorithm’ Gillespie (2014, 184). This can lead to the risk of shifting ‘the perspective of online activist communication from the actual protest issues to the protest spectacle’ (Poell & van Dijck, 2018, 9). How social media shapes the ways protesters connect, interact, and communicate with each other through its various features – hashtagging, retweeting, liking, following, friending – remains an area for deeper, sustained research. While every movement and its use of social media is bound to have its unique elements, the school climate strike movement feels rather different from other recent movements where the role of social media and its use has been studied (Arab Spring, Occupy), in that it is for and by school children. It emerges from the old-­ fashioned brick-and-mortar-based social organisation of school. However tempting it may be to think that within school communication is easy or naturally facilitated by childrens’ physical proximity to each other, for young people, occasions when they mobilise, and do so in defiance of school regulations in large numbers, are actually very rare. As the findings from Wahlstrom et al. (2019) suggest, the recruitment stems from school and classroom groups and is dependent on personal invitations among networks of friends within rather than outside school. While social media may not be a requirement to do this, it is clear that this has played a significant role in organising and strengthening networks between schools which have acted as nodes for these connecting webs, thus putting the organisation of school to a new use that they were never intended for. It still remains the case that the grounds for the movement had been pre-prepared when students felt sufficiently knowledgeable about the climate crisis to wish to commit to the cause when the prospect of school strikes came along. It seems that the movement built on this by exploiting the communicative power of digital media for organising across the many local groups. This new entanglement of young bodies, smartphones, digital networks, social organisation, and physical organisations in the service of activism feels a thing of wonder. Thus far, the role of such media in their educative/pedagogical role regarding climate change has received little attention although some exceptional work is beginning to emerge (Patrickson, 2020). The SCS movement has also been successful in remaining in the public eye through the use of a traditional weapon of protest – the spectacle of the public demonstration – organised for maximum effect on specific Fridays to ensure mass media and local community attention. This strategy of combining various old and new elements of the social for protest seems to allow social media to play its unique role in strengthening the collective/communitarian nature of the movement without being overdetermined by its features and affordances. This is not a development unique to SCS. In Japan, youth have been noticed using social media in a complicated way to insinuate themselves into the mass media flow, showing an evolution in the relationship between social and mainstream media, and demonstrating a ‘co-­ constitutive’ rather than a ‘sequential’ view of social media supplanting mass media (O’Day et al., 2018). The elements of ambition, temporality, context and geographical spread are different in the SCS movement and they contribute to a departure from how social

4.4  Organisational Websites and Social Media

75

media is used here compared to political movements set in specific national/regional contexts such as the Arab Spring or Occupy. With climate strikes, the movement is arguing for nothing short of an alternative future for the entire globe and all its human and non-human residents. The goals and demands of the SCS movement are not deliverable overnight or by acting for/within national boundaries. It is focused on attitudinal and systemic change and does not, indeed cannot, seek immediate gratification. It will need to remain preoccupied by its longer-term impact over span of decades and not dependent on the immediate highs and lows of digital virality in ‘quicker’ revolutions. Being a global movement also makes it far less reliant on ‘real-time communication’ and social media seems to be an organic part of this multi-element movement rather than the main component on which the movement relies. These features have been noted as common to many activist movements that seek to sustain ‘alternative temporalities’ alongside the quicker ‘real-time’ demands of media reporting (Poell & Rajagopalan, 2015; Poell, 2020; Kavada & Poell, 2021). Over 2019, and into early 2020, the movement successfully remained in the public eye. The ‘Solo but not Alone’ Twitter account focus on lone strikers in places as far apart as remote Scotland, Ireland, Uganda, India, China, Russia, Nigeria, Japan, etc. Striking is always risky and much more worrisome when doing alone and these acts of connecting with similar others through social media allows for a sense of solidarity to form. The collective sense of self that emerges in mass sharing (Bakardjieva, 2015; Coretti & Pica, 2015; Gerbaudo, 2015; Kavada, 2015, 2016; Monterde et  al., 2015) is evident here, made possible by strong affective ties (Juris, 2008). While the feature of connectivity, linking strikers across the world and giving them a sense of ‘oneness’, is a key advantage, the activities that protestors initiated were also shaped by their individual creativity and reflexivity. In keeping with how social media has been used for activism, it has allowed for both solidarity and individuality (Castells, 2012), where the sharing of content facilitates connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). The targeted use of these networks for the movement makes it possible to move away from the ‘drive for spectacle and immediacy that plagues an audience-oriented news cycle’ as they ‘work to maintain links among those specifically engaged with a matter of concern’ (Dean, 2002, 172–173). In other words, by nominating Fridays for weekly strikes and designating specific weeks for concerted global action, the SCS maintained some grasp over focused media coverage at a time of their choice. Social movements arising in repressive political contexts or contexts where the right to meet and protest themselves are under question naturally have rather different concerns. There is evidence that school climate strikes have taken place in contexts where the lives and families of protestors are endangered simply for daring to protest (e.g. Russia, China, Cameroon). But by and large they have been outweighed by contexts in which the strikes, although controversial, are more tolerated. For other causes involving quicker and more brutal power struggles, the use of social media has involved covert strategizing and leadership, and leaders have not always wanted to be identified as such (Coleman, 2014) tending instead to encourage a participatory evolution of movements. Such movements may have minimized and

76

4  Part II: Revolution

concealed decision-making and representative functions (Melucci, 1996), with activist leadership and social media protest activity mutually reinforcing each other (Poell & van Dijck, 2018). By contrast, when we pay closer attention to the Instagram accounts and Twitter feeds of leading protestors or organisations leading the strikes, we can see the very different uses to which they were put. In the more youthful and global SCS movement, figureheads like Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, Tille, Alexandra Villesenor, Jamie Margolin, Arshak Makichyan, Cristian Martelo, Leah Namugerwa, Patience Nabukalu (to name just a handful), and many others occupy more of a visible spokesperson role. That these powerful actors may still legally be ‘children’ marks a sharp contrast to other movements. In this context, social media in general and their social media accounts in particular, take a very personalised, yet circumscribed role. They also act as important hubs disseminating information about sites, accounts, and other relevant information to their mass of followers. In contrast, the Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts of the youth-led organisations (Youth for Climate or Fridays for Future in various countries) seem to work in tandem with regular email communication, particularly to mobilise protestors before each local, national, or global strike day. In addition, there was also the emergence of dedicated apps for striking, such as ‘FridaysForFuture’ which allow strikers to know about the next strike and to follow fellow strikers around the globe. It is unclear what impact these new supplementary and complementary platforms have had on the strike itself, and there is a clear need for more systematic and long-­ term research on how the SCS movement will evolve in a post-lockdown world. As a final point of contrast, I would like to draw attention to previous research which suggests that social media-led movements have ‘connective’ leaders who boost enthusiasm for their cause by producing ‘hopeful narratives’ which set in process ‘emotional contagion’, reinforcing hopeful, future-oriented narratives (Gerbaudo, 2016). The SCS clearly do not look to produce ‘hopeful narratives’ – at least not until they have convinced the audience of the desperateness of the situation and the urgent need for change. The SCS movement has, perhaps inevitably, focused much more on the more apocalyptic futures facing younger generations and used strategies of shaming to educate the public to act better. A video created by two young filmmakers for Friends of the Earth #Timetogrowup8 illustrates the thrust of this messaging. This video is a tragic-comic depiction of the hopelessness of the situation. Using role reversal, it places children in adult roles (such as a teacher) trying in vain to get adults who are portrayed as childish, misbehaving, distracted, carefree, and unable to grasp the ‘climate emergency’. The circulation of such messages through new media shows how they have been put to use as creative, slow burn, pedagogical tools. While most of these messages have focused on the dystopian nature of the futures that might await younger generations, perhaps the most hopeful was the call to the first Global Strike of 2020, on Valentine’s Day. Coinciding with the first year anniversary of school climate strikes, the call was to strike for the

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk7MiEGhhcw

8

4.4  Organisational Websites and Social Media

77

future, because ‘what could be more romantic than fighting for the future of planet Earth’. The SCS movement has close links with other, more adult-led organisations also concerned about climate change, such as Extinction Rebellion or Green Peace. Thus far, there is evidence of a sense of common purpose among these organisations which as a collective, make up a ‘coalition’ movement. Another example has been the emergence of parents who wish to support their striking children creating ‘Parents for Future’ (parentsforfuture.org.uk) and ‘Parents 4 Fridays’ support groups. The role of social media in this protest movement particularly in gathering together a coordinated, worldwide presence of activists is the subject of academic study (Boulianne et al., 2020). It seems that the loose joining up of school climate strikers with wider community movements had ensured a momentum and media coverage, with a range of opinion polls in the UK and abroad reflecting a ‘surge’ in concern about climate change among the general public who now seem to consider the climate crisis to be a serious threat to human futures (Barasi, 2019; Smith, 2019). As Joseph Nye (2004) noted, politics in an information age is often about ‘whose story wins’, and the media coverage of SCS indicates that, by and large, the movement succeeded in getting mostly positive coverage throughout 2019. Research indicates that the impact of Friday strikes seemed to vary between countries and on different types of media coverage (Smith & Bognar, 2019). In the UK, an organization such as Extinction Rebellion (XR) has had more coverage, but this has tended to be more negative compared to the coverage of the younger Fridays for Future (FFF). In the USA, neither FFF nor XR is believed to have made as much public impact. Even though the effect of the ‘soft power’ of social media is difficult to assess with certainty, there are emerging links being made between social media being a useful tool to change public perceptions, and the possibility of public opinion influencing political decision-making (Mavrodieva et al., 2019). However, thus far, the welcome declarations of climate emergency by governments have not been followed with significant action or sufficient commitment to the deeper, more painful demands of system change. As has been noted by Thunberg herself, the school strikes have not yielded significant change in policy terms (Harvey, 2019), but the advances in changing public perception regarding the urgency of the need for action cannot be underestimated. There are dangers faced by any social movement organization around the loss of control of their messages and images when absorbed into the personality-driven mass media that tend to blur the lines between politics and culture, engagement, and entertainment (O’Day et al., 2018). When traditional media focused on white activists to the exclusion of activists of colour, young people have used social media to respond robustly and creatively to such erasures, placing their identities, roles, and urgent needs more centrally in the conversation. They have used social media to increase information sharing and transnationalised the climate crisis by linking local protests within a global network and allowing youth to vocalise their concerns on a global stage (Boulianne et al., 2020) increasing public awareness and forcing leaders to acknowledge the problem in public. Efforts to address the issue are still

78

4  Part II: Revolution

sporadic and acting to keep climate change in the public eye is likely to continue to be a key strategy of the movement.

4.5  Wresting Control and the Push Back I want to focus in this part on the explicit push back to this ‘revolution’ so far. The act of striking, drawing on practices of civil disobedience, and histories of youth protest, remains a dangerous and risky act in several countries. We have come to know of how some school climate activists in Russia (Watts, 2019) and in Cameroon have paid a high price, being arrested and/or being imposed with ruinous fines that have decimated family finances (Peace News, 2020). In sites like the UK, where arrests of school children has not followed, there have been contrary stances about the rightful place of children (is it in or out of school) and what legitimate actions ought to be allowed. Initially schools in the UK seemed to have been caught out by the surge, sending out ‘mixed signals’ to pupils, with some supporting and others threatening striking children with expulsions. When Edinburgh city council voted to allow only one day’s strike a year as any more would ‘affect their education’ (Brooks, 2019), it revealed the battle between authorities and youth strikers over about how one might define a worthwhile ‘education’. A UK government Department for Education spokeswoman stated that the decision of how to deal with strikers was a matter for individual schools: ‘However, we are clear that pupils can only take term-time leave in exceptional circumstances, and where this leave has been authorised by the headteacher’ (Doward, 2019). Climate strikers in turn have insisted that they were striking, not ‘taking leave’, and that these are ‘exceptional circumstances’, demanding a recognition of this period as a crisis/emergency. The claim of exceptional circumstances necessitating exceptional actions and in turn raising questions over the ‘appropriateness’ of action and intention has emerged as a point of contention between strikers and authorities. The goal of instigating and achieving ‘system change’ has come to be seen as an ‘extreme ideology’ by some authorities and as ‘essential’ for any future existence by the strikers. In an extremist framing, ‘safeguarding’ of children/young people who may be ‘unaware’ of the philosophy and perhaps ‘true nature’ of system change is being used as the entry point for intervention by authorities. These two opposing concerns – need for system change and vulnerability of young people – can be seen working in opposition in the now recalled guidance by UK counter-terrorism policy (Dodd & Grierson, 2020). Titled ‘Safeguarding Young People and Adults from Ideological Extremism’, the withdrawn guidance can now be viewed on news sites9 that reported on it. The guidance was meant to help ‘statutory partners’ such as teachers and staff in government

9  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51071959 and https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/ jan/10/xr-extinction-rebellion-listed-extremist-ideology-police-prevent-scheme-guidance

4.5  Wresting Control and the Push Back

79

organisations recognise when young people or adults were vulnerable to extreme or violent ideologies and, if they were, to report them to the UK government’s Prevent programme.10 Some groups to which school climate strikers may (or may not) belong, such as Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Greenpeace, were in the list of extremist and terrorist groups listed as seeking to radicalise vulnerable young people to take extreme action. The guidance in parts speaks specifically of Extinction Rebellion and offers an opportunity to examine how activisms around climate change can be framed, how matters of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘radicalism’ are brought together, and how subject positions are offered to those working in institutions. The guidance is also an illustration of how feelings such as fear can be instigated/set in motion, to produce effects and leave impressions on some bodies (Ahmed, 2004). The guidance sets out why certain actions and groups may be considered as tending towards terrorism/radicalisation and then lists specific actions that one might see and hear, which are worthy of reporting. The guidance focuses on the movement’s aim for ‘system change’ and its ‘anti-­ establishment’ ethos as threats, particularly to vulnerable ‘school-age children’ who may not be aware of this. It says, ‘While non-violent against persons, the campaign encourages other law-breaking activities’. It goes on to say, ‘While concern about climate change is not in itself extreme, activists may may encourage vulnerable people to perform acts of violence or commit such acts themselves’. In these sentences we see the separation of concern about climate change (not extreme) from how one ought to respond (what is appropriate). Among signs to watch out for are ‘propaganda’ materials including stickers or logos proclaiming messages such as ‘Tell the truth’ or ‘Rebel’. Speech acts using ‘strong and emotive terms’ about climate change or species extinction are said to be another sign. Readers are also encouraged to look out for those individuals who know to adopt the ‘passively limp’ posture upon arrest, as it is seen as a tactic to divert police resources. This list and its injunctions are an illustration how the eye is trained to see and how the mind is trained to think and to ‘correctly’ recognise vulnerability, threat, and radicalism in the context of young people’s activisms. While the guidance was thoroughly criticised and hastily revoked, the UK’s Home Minister Priti Patel was more sanguine, claiming that it was important to consider ‘all matters’ as an issue of public risk to security. Such responses reveal something of the battle that ensues when there is an open attempt to ‘wrest control’. While many teachers have indicated a refusal to report on climate strikers in their schools, some have taken a more oppositional stance questioning the ability of young people to fully comprehend a matter such as climate change (Ferguson, 2020). It is in the face of such risk and controversy that school climate strikes manifest more obviously as an act of revolution. It also reveals the placement of  Prevent Strategy – A controversial programme, the UK government’s Prevent Strategy aims to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. Schools and universities are among other educational and service sector organisations which must abide by the strategy, and work to prevent the radicalisation of people. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prevent-duty-guidance/ revised-prevent-duty-guidance-for-england-and-wales

10

80

4  Part II: Revolution

youth  – not yet admissible into adult human status and therefore vulnerable or unable to grasp the implications arising from the demand for system change – as a liminal category open for adult intervention.

4.6  The Friday Spectacles My in-person observations started with the phenomenon of the Friday strikes, when groups of bodies, young bodies, not-quite-adult bodies, emerged out of school gates to gather onto city squares, creating a public spectacle. These were raucous events, with serious and jocular call and response shouts (What do we want? System change. When do we want it? Yesterday). They were always accompanied by marchers holding placards with eye-catching slogans, mostly handwritten on recycled bits of cardboard, a march around the city square/block, sometimes accompanied by samba drums, whistles or other musical instruments, and finishing off at a public square with speeches from children, teachers, politicians, poetry read outs, installations, and other activist art, seamlessly bringing together the political and cultural. Here are a couple of photographs from Norwich (Fig. 4.1, taken on 29 November 2019), but a Google image search will reveal similarities with other school strikers across the globe. Disobedient children, particularly when acting as a collective, tend to make headlines. In the SCS movement, the act of striking was meant to draw attention both to their disobedience and the reason for this rebellion. These acts then oblige us to pause and consider Guy Debord’s caution that spectacular forms of rebelliousness are not, by any means, incompatible with a ‘smug acceptance of what exists… for the simple reason that dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity’ (1994, 59).

Fig. 4.1  Photos from school climate strike, Norwich, Nov 29, 2019. (Author’s own)

4.6  The Friday Spectacles

81

Dissatisfaction and its public expression, when seen and talked about, can be conflated with value. Making a statement for a cause can engender other feelings like smugness, which can be experienced as a virtue in itself, without any discernible effect or change, even in one’s own behaviour, let alone the wider system. The ubiquitous Che Guevara t-shirt has come to symbolise Debord’s concerns about rebellion being commodified, turned into a statement about self and a shorthand for a preferred self-image. Is the school climate strike offering something similar, a moment of spectacular rebelliousness yielding not much beyond smugness? A sceptical reading could suggest this to be the case. However, the strikes also contrast with other recently expressed worries about public apathy to climate emergency issues. Writing as recently as 2016, Amitav Ghosh notes: Today everyone with a computer and a web connection is an activist. [Yet] …politicization has not translated into a wider engagement with the crisis of climate change…. great numbers take to the streets to express indignation and outrage over a wide range of issues; on television channels and social media, people speak their minds ever more stridently. Yet climate change has not resulted in an outpouring of passion in the country. This despite the fact that India has innumerable environmental organisations and grassroots movements. The voices of the country’s many eminent climate scientists, environmental activists, and reporters do not appear to have made much of a mark either. … What is true of India is true also of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal: climate change has not been a significant political issue in any of those countries even though the impacts are already being felt across the Indian subcontinent…. (125–126, 2016)

While there may (yet) not be a discernible outpouring of passion among the general populace, young school climate strikers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, among other countries, have certainly overturned Ghosh’s concerns (see Al Jazeera, 2020). Still, questions about the authenticity of this movement linger. Is this spectacle of school-goers striking, a genuine revolution? Are they not just bunking off school? Do they really comprehend the complexity of climate change? Even if genuine in intention, for how long will children keep striking or be allowed to keep striking on Friday afternoons? Will the movement ‘dissolve’ when it stops trending on Twitter and disappears off the news headlines? Is COVID-19 the end of this movement? For the purposes of the argument here, I am less concerned about the genuineness or longevity of the movement (although from my study with this movement, I do not believe it is in any danger of petering out), and more interested in the actions of strikers themselves, and the pedagogies that it embodies, as a revolutionary moment. When studying the movement, the handwritten slogans on placards caught my eye. The slogans contrast with the more considered, broader, and deeper demands on the websites mentioned previously. It seemed that the slogans captured the youthfulness of student voices, with a blunt pithiness they conveyed the urgency and passion of the moment. I began to notice that many of the most powerful, hard-­ hitting slogans appeared consistently in photographs of school climate strikes across the world, often with minor adaptations, showing a strong communication network and unity of message across globally dispersed school groups. Studying these slogans and placards turned into a ‘studying with’ and a ‘learning from’ process that gradually spelt out implications for educational research and linked to developments in social theory relevant to the Anthropocene.

82

4  Part II: Revolution

Slogans such as ‘The oceans are rising and so are we’, ‘Expect resistance’, and ‘Reclaim your future’ all proclaimed the revolutionary intent of youth who demanded and expected change. There was even an open threat in ‘We are future voters, we want change’ and ‘You can ignore us, but you will regret it’. Some of their prominent messages related to the act of striking from school. They claimed that their striking was a conscious, deliberate act of civil disobedience. It was their democratic right to protest and it was directly linked to their frustration with the inaction or inadequate action of authorities in the face of an escalating climate crisis. Drawing on previous histories of revolution and struggle, one popular slogan said: ‘Civil disobedience requires no permission slip’ (Fig. 4.2). In sharp contrast to the pushback from some sections of adult society, here were voices claiming a higher moral ground. To adults who insisted that children ought to stay in school, focus on their education, remain uncontaminated by ‘politics’, and display the mandated innocence of childhood, they responded by pointing out that they did not stop learning when they were on strike: ‘Activism is learning’ (Fig.  4.3). They were revealing their understanding of learning and education to be broader, expanding notions of what, how, and where one learnt. When the slogans include a ‘you’ to whom they speak, this is frequently the inactive/incompetent elders in authority. They pointed out the failures of the authorities in clear language: ‘There will be less activism in schools when there is more learning in government’, ‘If you did your job, we’d be in school’, ‘We’re only striking because you’re not acting’ (Fig.  4.4), and quite bluntly, ‘We’ll be less activist if

Fig. 4.2  Image by Julian Meehan is licensed under CC BY 2.0

4.6  The Friday Spectacles

Fig. 4.3  Image by Julian Meehan is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Fig. 4.4  Image by Julian Meehan is licensed under CC BY 2.0

83

84

4  Part II: Revolution

you’ll be less shit’ (Fig. 4.5). They also noted with indisputable logic that ‘Skipping a climate pact is worse than skipping school’. Getting the attention of the elders when they might feel less invested in a future they would not live to see is the task of these strikes. In other words, some of these messages are crafted precisely to make those who do not (yet) care, care. In this context, the slogan ‘You’ll die of old age, your kids will die of climate change’ (Fig. 4.6) gets to the heart of the matter – the serious matter of life and death on planet earth. The messages which speak of an act of harm/murder against those inheriting the future are crafted with the purpose of shocking those in authority to take action, or at least awakening the awareness of others who may be passers-by: ‘Killing the planet means killing us’. Perhaps the most striking messages were those that questioned the definition and status of adulthood and childhood: ‘If you can’t be adults, then we will’. What then is an adult as imagined by this group of strikers? It seems that there is an expectation of adults to engage with the science behind climate change, and to get sufficiently educated about the crisis to want to care, and to want to act. One popular slogan was ‘Let us teach you or we won’t be taught’. This signals a remarkable reversal of roles. Traditionally, adults are meant to direct youth education, to exhort the value of engaging critically with knowledge, of developing a moral code and the strength of character to make a positive impact on the world. Here, the young on the marches showed a willingness to take on these obligations, with a notable degree of frustration. The slogans ‘We’re missing our lessons so we can teach you one’ (Fig. 4.7),

Fig. 4.5  ‘We'll be less activist if you'll be less shit – #climatestrike Melbourne IMG_3467’ by John Englart (Takver) is licensed under CC BY-­SA 2.0

4.6  The Friday Spectacles

85

Fig. 4.6  ‘You will die of old age, our children will die of climate change – Melbourne climate strike – IMG_4068’ by John Englart (Takver) is licensed under CC BY-­SA 2.0

Fig. 4.7  File:2019 09 21 School Strike for Climate – San Rafael, California (48773698636).jpg by Daniel Arauz is licensed under CC BY 2.0

86

4  Part II: Revolution

‘We’re bunking to educate adults’, ‘Let’s move climate change to History class – I can’t believe I’m teaching what I learned at school’, and, the trenchant, ‘Why am I spending my summer educating adults about the importance of my future?’ all speak of a mix of disillusionment and the need to educate adults whose awareness and knowledge about the climate crisis is shown to be wanting. These outspoken and well-crafted slogans are masterpieces in communication. They also provoke the question of what is it that gives so much assurance and authority to these young people. On what basis do they speak and act with such confidence? It seems that ‘uniting behind the science’ is at least partly the answer. The marchers reveal an understanding that learning and gaining knowledge and moral action must not be unrelated. The slogan ‘Why should we go to school if you won’t listen to the educated?’ (Fig. 4.8) points to the pointlessness of education if society, decision-makers, and people in positions of power feel able to ignore the weight of research evidence around climate change or refuse to act on this knowledge. When critical adults make this point of governments, they carry far less weight than when they are made by children who are told to go to school. It is precisely their position as youth who are not given a choice to evade formal education that makes this argument poignant and potent. This also then raises philosophical questions about the point of education and the modernist discourses of progress and development that surround it. The slogan goes: ‘Why the F*ck are we studying for a future we won’t even have?’ (Fig. 4.9).

Fig. 4.8  ‘Why should we go to school if you won't listen to the educated? – Melbourne climate strike – IMG_4067’ by John Englart (Takver) is licensed under CC BY-­SA 2.0

4.6  The Friday Spectacles

87

Fig. 4.9  ‘File:GrèveClimatGenève-­15mars2019-­091.jpg’ by MHM55 is licensed under CC BY-­SA 4.0

By repeatedly drawing attention to the fact that adults have abandoned the unspoken pact to care for the futures of the younger generation, they reveal an intergenerational discord: ‘Who are you to decide my future?’, ‘Our future, your responsibility’, ‘The adults are shitting on our future’ (a Greta Thunberg quote), and versions of ‘You are burning/destroying our future’. The exhortation is to adults to plan and build for a future that will not belong to them, but to the young. This is a wresting of not just intellectual control but of idea of ‘the future’ itself, which can only belong to the young. So far, I have explored how and in what ways youth on climate strikes have attempted to speak to the world at large and of how the organisations behind the strikes adapted their strategy of creating globally co-ordinated special event strikes to secure media and public attention. I have also argued that the slogans point to a

88

4  Part II: Revolution

reversal in intergenerational responsibilities that is of relevance. They emphasise their reasons for striking, their grievances over the inaction and apathy of older generations, and their worries over a liveable future. In this they connected their learning with moral action and the imperative to make changes to the present. Climate strikers in general seem focused on educating the public and, appealing to, educating, provoking, or shaming those in positions of authority to commit to actions for systemic change. These actions reveal how the ‘spectacles’ staged every Friday performed a public pedagogy – an education offered with pre-meditation, intent, and plan, in the interest of ‘the public’. The idea of creating alternative futures is to do with newness and to expand or upset how we tend to think of futures in conventional ways. The styles, modes, and messages of school climate strikers coalesced to provide a pedagogy for such a future. This pedagogy pointed to existing problems with knowledge creation and its use, as well as its humanist orientations. In the final part of this chapter I turn to explore the nature of this pubic pedagogy and the issues it throws up for educators.

4.7  A Public Pedagogy for Alternative Futures There’s been a vibrant debate about the concept of public pedagogy spread across the last decade centred around questions about how we may understand the nature of the ‘public’ and of ‘pedagogy’ (see Biesta, 2012; Giroux, 2004, 2019; Sandlin et al., 2010, 2011, 2017). These have led to clearer conceptualisations of the terminology and increasingly nuanced theorisations of this field. When we talk about public pedagogy, we can think of both the educational force/power of media, popular culture, and society and their educational responsibility (through adult or community education programmes) (Biesta, 2019). Following Biesta (drawing on Hannah Arendt, 1955, 1958, 1977), I align with this programmatic view of public pedagogy that reconnects the educational and the political in the public sphere, to ask the question of how school climate strikes enact such a form of public pedagogy. Firstly, it is worth reviewing associations of the ‘public’ as usually discussed. School climate strikes have been taking place at a time where numerous critical scholars have noted that the quality of the ‘public domain’ has been eroded through the logics of the neoliberal market and through a focus on individual/private benefit (Marquand, 2004). This decline of the public redirects the population to consumer, rather than citizen roles, with the result that individual growth is encouraged and notions of public duty or engagement get associated with ‘hard, demanding, “unnatural” austerities’ (Marquand, 2004, 79). This could stem from a somewhat unattractive normative understanding of the public as a suite of formal institutions and activities (Mitchell, 1995). Marquand’s more palatable definition of the public is as not belonging to either the market or the private spheres but a space where strangers,

4.7  A Public Pedagogy for Alternative Futures

89

as equals, come together to define the public interest and produce public goods. However even this version implies a demanding, perhaps even joyless role for actors, prioritising collective interest in a manner that does not valorise private wants, needs, or indeed personal affective rewards. Therefore acting for this collective public domain is still seen as requiring ‘a certain discipline’ and ‘a certain selfrestraint’ (Marquand, 2004, 57). These austere qualities of ‘restraint’, ‘discipline’, and ‘sacrifice’ sound daunting and even dated, and they are not those that are typically associated with the condition of youth. As Biesta notes, Marquand insists that advocating discipline and self-restraint is not a natural inclination but something that must be ‘learned and then internalized, sometimes painfully’ (2004, 57). The emphasis on pain and hardship without much indication of what may be gained as a result is striking. And yet it is also striking that these messages of sacrifice, change, and abandonment of consumerist lifestyles are the ones that underpin young climate strikers’ demands. Their revolution is not about a systemic change to further a notion of life that relies on increased economic growth, wealth, or individual prosperity but one that asks for less greed, de-growth, and thus more frugal, even austere lifestyles. Slogans from the strikes such as ‘Coral, not coal’, ‘The ocean takes care of us, let’s return the favour’, and ‘Make earth great again’ all reveal that these ‘hard’ demands are being made in exchange for the prospect of a post-Anthropocene future that will benefit a public far beyond the human. Such an expansion of the great web of the non-human and the physical environment for inclusion as the ‘public’ is surely the redefinition that this juncture of the Anthropocene demands. There is still some skepticism that for those, like the young, who are yet to come into their own – in terms of independent lives, jobs, mortgages, and responsibilities  – preaching austere philosophies and lifestyles is much easier. How can one regret losing luxuries that one is yet to taste? Some would argue that their learning is not yet painful and therefore not yet fully realised in the young, or even that this is just a temporary phase that will dissipate as they move into adulthood, and become full members of humanity. And yet the message of striking on behalf of a cause that is for the greater good of the planet that voluntarily embraces frugality and austerity (in comparative lifestyle terms  – going vegan, shunning flights and asking for changes to institutions and policies to encourage such behaviour) is perhaps possible precisely because of the condition of youth is alien, is other, to that of being an adult. There is though a clear and resonant gain or benefit that young climate strikers enjoy. There is an unmistakable affective force in the shaping of what feels like the new aesthetic, the new ‘tastes’ for the post-Anthropocene. Making visible the beauty and the values of such tastes is part of this movement and thus is not just about a ‘negative’ frugality and austerity. This development of the new aesthetic affords personal, social, and public benefits that are a far cry from the dry and normative association of the public with formal institutions and activities. Hannah Arendt’s conceptualistion of the public as not a physical/spatial location

90

4  Part II: Revolution

(although these may be put to use in building the public sphere/domain) but as something centred in the activities, relationships, and interactions sustained between strangers feels closer to the mood and tone of the strikes. This echoes the nature of the school strikes and the activities and organisation that it entails, supported by the digital network of social media and websites that binds together a global family of strangers who on the surface have little in common beyond attending school and a justifiable fear for their futures. Arendt’s principle that the ‘public’ will cease to exist with the ‘disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves’ (1958, 199) also aligns, as this particular polis will disappear when the strikes cease to take place. The activities that create the public sphere imply a set of norms, actions, and decision rules (Marquand, 2004, 4). To Arendt, one of these norms is that a public space is one where ‘freedom can appear’ (Arendt, 1955, p  4). This freedom is emphatically not about private freedom, such as freedom to do whatever one choses (liberal freedom) but this freedom is linked to newness, that is, freedom ‘to call something into being which did not exist before’ (Arendt, 1977, 151). Through saying and doing, humans insert newness into the world, and this kind of action brings forth freedom. This is both a public and a political phenomenon as such acts of beginnings/newness require the response of others. Contemporary thinkers such as Shirky (2011) who theorise about freedom and the public sphere in the context of a digital landscape suggest that we ought to take an environmental view of freedom, that is, it takes the view that a strong public sphere is essential for any democratic regime. According to this view, it is the development of fundamental political freedoms including media, conversations, and internet freedoms which can create the grounds for longer-term democracies. Echoing elements of Arendt’s conceptions of the public sphere, Shirky maintains that change can be wrought through the conversations, dissemination, and adoption of ideas and opinions that strengthen the public sphere. Thus access to information becomes less important than access to free conversation. Securing individual citizens’ ability to speak in public is thus an important part of this development. This leads Shirky to note that a society in which citizens have freedom of assembly rather than just access to social media would force governments to serve their citizens better. As in the case of the SCS, the response of others may not be in alignment with the protagonists, and they may respond in unexpected, even unwelcome ways. But this quality of difference or plurality is for Arendt, the ‘condition of human action’ (Arendt, 1958, 8). The freedom of one must be tied to the freedom (the actions and beginnings) of others, even disagreeable others, and their actions and responses. If we tried to police or homogenise this sphere, freedom would erode – the freedom that can only arise through beginnings which are responded to, by others who are not the same. While plurality is an essential characteristic of this public sphere in which freedom comes into being, this cannot be any plurality, but one that requires ‘decision, …deliberation and judgement about what is to be done’ (Biesta, 2019,

4.7  A Public Pedagogy for Alternative Futures

91

136). There is no bland consensus and this space relies on the preservation of distance, strangeness, and dissensus in order to arrive at judgements regarding actions. For Arendt, this creation of the public sphere is not about achieving a common ground (a brother/sisterhood of shared values, etc.) but about achieving a common world. Arendt’s insistence on a certain distance, even suspicion of emotion, love or passion in the creation of these common worlds has been noticed (Caver, 2019) particularly in the correspondence between her and James Baldwin. Baldwin’s ideas by comparison, place greater value on the affective in the public sphere – how one feels about the world, and “how such feelings when they are articulated and confronted, can help us create new tastes with which to judge the world and who matters in it” (Caver, 2019, 60). This insistence on the affective and the benefits of it for creating the public sphere help understand the role of the school climate strikes. Without enjoying the benefits of being part of a movement that is seeking to valorise new tastes and judgements, there will be less of an investment in the new institutions and organisations of the future. The actions and emotions released through the school climate strikes resonate with Baldwin’s ethico-aesthetic politics. Revitalising our tastes and judgements through affective sensibilities opens new possibilities for the intimate love of, rather than a distance from such common worlds. The Climate Strikes are precisely such a move to reach for these common worlds. They embody the elements of assembly, freedom, feeling, passion, developing new tastes and thus new judgements that determine actions. Having discussed the notion of the public sphere, it is worth finally turning to the notion of pedagogy in this sphere. Biesta writes of three modes of public pedagogy: 1. A pedagogy for – aimed at – the public. 2. A pedagogy of the public. 3. A pedagogy for publicness (enacting an interest in the public quality of human togetherness). The first form of pedagogy for the public is about instruction or schooling – it focuses on what to think, how to act, what to be (an agent teaches). It has a moralistic undertone “I’ll teach you a lesson” and this can erase difference and plurality. The second is a pedagogy of the public, that is learning, rather than instruction. Democratic processes and practices provide opportunities for collective learning, leading to critical awareness and critical consciousness (an agent acts as a facilitator), such as in an adult education class. However, this assumes a ‘regime of learning’, as well as the danger that social/political problems get translated as a problem that can be resolved through individual learning (rather than collective responsibility). The third is a pedagogy concerned with the quality of publicness or togetherness of actors and events. This is not just instruction or facilitation, but is activist, experimental (even speculative) and demonstrative. That the school climate strikes are an embodiment of such a pedagogy, I hope, is evident by now. The activism

92

4  Part II: Revolution

creates possibilities of being and doing, of ‘acting in concert’, and offers opportunities for plurality in public relationships. It is inventive, enacting new ways to be activist, and demonstrates alternative futures through the shaping of new tastes and judgements. It is a pedagogy of demonstration that is public in orientation and in execution because it obeys neither the logic of the market nor that of the private. It follows therefore that this experimental/speculative demonstration is always risky. But in expanding the notion of the public to include much more than the human, and exhibiting a range of affective states in the doing of this, this enacts a new public pedagogy. It does this through insisting on our capacity to think and to feel for constituents who are not just human.

4.8  Meanwhile… I wish to end this section by returning to just one of many ‘meanwhile’ moments that arose in the midst of the research. As discussed previously, these parallel moments, the intra-actions that occur alongside and amidst other processes and stages of research are generative in terms of helping us shake off the ‘inertia of everyday routines’ (Braidotti, 2011, p. 90). Paying attention to these characteristics of simultaneity, discontinuity, and nonlinearity of research (Guyotte et al., 2020) creates alternative possibilities. Throughout the time I followed the SCS closely, many sources revealed an ageist gaze on youth and particularly youth activism – government agencies, academic literature, traditions, and mores. The instances of misrecognition or incomprehension of youth, their actions, and their organisation for activism show that there is still much room to improve intergenerational relations. By talking openly about adult responsibilities, and their abdication of them in relation to the climate crisis, the SCS makes us consider youth as educators, as practicing a public pedagogy where they question and flip established roles of adults and youth, and teachers and learners. By opening up room for learning in more than one direction or dimension, that is, learning that moves across generations and lifespans, they enact a pedagogy that allows us to see differently the practices of the world and their histories. They allow us to think beyond the limits of what is currently established as comprehensible. Alongside these growing realisations, I have also been teaching a module on the constitution of childhood/youth to third year undergraduate students of Education. As part of this module, one of its central components is to try and follow the ways that childhood has been understood from various academic perspectives. Patrick Ryan’s (2008) analysis and representation of academic models of childhood and his mapping of them has been incredibly useful in this process. But studying with the

4.8 Meanwhile…

93

Children are Subjects who Participate in their own Representation

The Authentic Child

The Political Child Social Actor Theory (The ‘new’ Social Study of Childhood)

Romantic Developmentalism

Childhood is a Political-Cultural Construction

Childhood is a Natural Phenomenon

Socialization Theory

Positive-Scientific Developmental Theory

The Developing Child

The Conditioned Child Children are Products to be studied under Controlled Conditions

Fig. 4.10  Patrick Ryan, ‘the landscape of modern childhood’ (2008, 558). (Reprinted from The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXXVIII (2008), 258, with the permission of the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History and The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. c 2008 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc)

SCS movement meant that it was no longer sufficient to stop with discussing Ryan’s model of how academic study sees or frames children/youth. Ryan allows us to see the history of our gaze on childhood/youth (Fig. 4.10), but there was now a space to draw a model to illustrate how the youth/child from the SCS movement might see adults – a model of adulthood from their perspective seemed necessary. I present this (Fig. 4.11) here as a far from established ‘truth’ but as a thinking tool to provoke and disturb that infamous inertia of our everyday practices. Question: What changes to educational practice and interaction does such a model of adult-youth/child relationship entail?

94

4  Part II: Revolution

The Learning Adult

Adults are subjects who can act in solidarity with non-adults

Adults as coconstituents of power and equality

The Obtuse Adult

The Patronising Adult

Adults as high control, powerful figures

Adults as governed by narrow self-interests

The Orthodox Adult

Fig. 4.11  Landscape of modern childhood – reimagined from Ryan 2008

References Ahmed, S. (2004). Collective feelings: Or, the impressions left by others. Theory, Culture and Society, 21(2), 25–42. Akec, A. (2019, October 19). When I look at Extinction Rebellion, all I see is white faces. That has to change. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/19/ extinction-­rebellion-­white-­faces-­diversity Al Jazeera. (2020, September 21). ‘No planet B’: Millions take to streets in global climate strike. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/09/planet-­thousands-­join-­global-­climate-­strike-­ asia-­190920040636503.html Arendt, H. (1955). Men in dark times. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. The University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1977). Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought. Penguin Books. Bakardjieva, M. (2015). Do clouds have politics? Collective actors in social media land. Information, Communication & Society, 18(8), 983–990. Barasi, L. (2019, May 10). Guest Post: Polls reveal sure in concern in UK about climate change. https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-­p ost-­r olls-­r eveal-­s urge-­i n-­c oncern-­i n-­u k-­a bout-­ climate-­change Barclay, E., & Resnick, B. (2019, September 22). How big was the global climate strike? 4 million people, activists estimate. Vox. https://www.vox.com/energy-­and-­environment/2019/9/20/20876143/ climate-­strike-­2019-­september-­20-­crowd-­estimate Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–768.

References

95

Best, S. J., & Krueger, B. (2005). Analyzing the representativeness of internet political participation. Political Behavior, 27, 183–216. Biesta, G. (2012). Becoming public: Public pedagogy, citizenship and the public sphere. Social & Cultural Geography, 13(7), 683–697. Biesta, G. (2019). Making pedagogy public: For the public, of the public, or in the interest of publicness? In Obstinate education (pp. 130–140). Brill Sense. Bonilla, Y., & Rosa, J. (2015). # Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist, 42, 4–17. Boulianne, S., Lalancette, M., & Ilkiw, D. (2020). “School strike 4 climate”: Social media and the international youth protest on climate change. Media and Communication, 8(2), 208–218. Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory (2nd ed.). Columbia University Press. Brooks, L. (2019, August 16). Edinburgh limits pupil climate strike approval to once a year. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/16/ edinburgh-­limits-­pupil-­climate-­strike-­approval-­to-­once-­a-­year Castells, M. (2012). Networks of outrage and hope: Social movements in the internet age. Wiley. Caver, M. (2019). A different price for the ticket: Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin on love and politics. Polity, 51(1), 35–61. Cohen, C. J., Kahne, J., Bowyer, B., Middaugh, E., & Rogowski, J. (2012). Participatory politics: New media and youth political action. MacArthur. Coleman, G. (2014). Hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: The many faces of anonymous. Verso. Coretti, L., & Pica, D. (2015). The rise and fall of collective identity in networked movements: Communication protocols, Facebook, and the anti-Berlusconi protest. Information, Communication & Society, 18(8), 951–967. Davis, J., Moulton, A., Van Sant, L., & Williams, B. (2019). Anthropocene, capitalocene,… plantationocene?: A manifesto for ecological justice in an age of global crises. Geography Compass, 13(5), e12438. Dean, J. (2002). Publicity’s secret. Cornell University Press. Debord, G. (1994). The society of the spectacle (3rd ed.). Zone Books. Dewey, J. (1927). The public and its problems. Henry Holt and Company. Dodd, V., & Grierson, J. (2020, January 10). Terrorism police list Extinction Rebellion as extremist ideology. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-­news/2020/jan/10/ xr-­extinction-­rebellion-­listed-­extremist-­ideology-­police-­prevent-­scheme-­guidance Doward, J. (2019, February 10). Pupils’ climate change strike threat poses dilemma for heads. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/feb/10/ pupil-­strike-­climate-­change-­puts-­schools-­on-­spot Earl, J., Maher, T., & Elliott, T. (2017). Youth, activism, and social movements. Sociology Compass, 11(4), e12465. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12465 Elliott, T., & Earl, J. (2018). Organizing the next generation: Youth engagement with activism inside and outside of organizations. Social Media+ Society, 4(1), 2056305117750722. Evelyn, K. (2020, January 25). Outrage at whites-only image as Ugandan climate activist cropped from photo. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/24/ whites-­only-­photo-­uganda-­climate-­activist-­vanessa-­nakate Ferguson, D. (2020, January 21). Should a teacher report a pupil for Extinction Rebellion activism? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jan/21/ should-­a-­teacher-­report-­a-­pupil-­for-­extinction-­rebellion-­activism Flanagan, C. (2013). Teenage citizens: The political theories of the young. Harvard University Press. Gerbaudo, P. (2015). Protest avatars as memetic signifiers: Political profile pictures and the construction of collective identity on social media in the 2011 protest wave. Information, Communication & Society, 18(8), 916–929. Gerbaudo, P. (2016). Constructing public space|rousing the Facebook crowd: Digital enthusiasm and emotional contagion in the 2011 protests in Egypt and Spain. International Journal of Communication, 10, 20. Ghosh, A. (2016). The great derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable. Penguin UK.

96

4  Part II: Revolution

Gillespie, T. (2014). The relevance of algorithms. In T. Gillespie, P. J. Boczkowski, & K. A. Foot (Eds.), Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society (pp. 167–194). MIT Press. Giroux, H. (2004). Public pedagogy and the politics of neo-liberalism: Making the political more pedagogical. Policy Futures in Education, 2(3–4), 494–503. Giroux, H. (2019). Cultural studies in dark times: Public pedagogy and the challenge of neoliberalism. Fast Capitalism, 1(2). Guyotte, K., Flint, M., Kidd, B., Potts, C., Irwin, A., & Bennett, L. (2020). Meanwhile: Posthuman intra-actions in/with a post-qualitative readings class. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(1), 109–121. Harvey, F. (2019, December 6). Greta Thunberg says school strikes have achieved nothing. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/06/ greta-­thunberg-­says-­school-­strikes-­have-­achieved-­nothing Hickey-Moody, A. (2016). Youth agency and adult influence: A critical revision of little publics. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 38(1), 58–72. Jenkins, H. (2016). Youth voice, media, and political engagement. In H.  Jenkins, S.  Shrestova, L. Gamber-Thompson, N. Kligler-Vilenchik, & A. Zimmerman (Eds.), By any media necessary: The new youth activism (pp. 1–60). New York University Press. Juris, J. S. (2008). Performing politics: Image, embodiment, and affective solidarity during anti-­ corporate globalization protests. Ethnography, 9(1), 61–97. Juris, J. S. (2012). Reflections on# Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation. American Ethnologist, 39(2), 259–279. Kavada, A. (2015). Creating the collective: Social media, the Occupy Movement and its constitution as a collective actor. Information, Communication & Society, 18(8), 872–886. Kavada, A. (2016). Social movements and political agency in the digital age: A communication approach. Media and Communication, 4(4), 8–12. Kavada, A., & Poell, T. (2021). From Counterpublics to contentious publicness: Tracing the temporal, spatial, and material articulations of popular protest through social media. Communication Theory, 31(2), 190–208. Kennelly, J. (2011). Citizen youth: Culture, activism, and agency in a Neoliberal Era. Palgrave. Laville, S., & Watts, J. (2019, September 20). Across the globe millions join biggest climate protest ever. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/21/ across-­the-­globe-­millions-­join-­biggest-­climate-­protest-­ever Longley, M. (2019, September 28). Opinion: Why white, middle-aged men are so angry with Greta Thunberg. NewsHub. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-­zealand/2019/09/opinion-­ why-­white-­middle-­aged-­men-­are-­so-­angry-­with-­greta-­thunberg.html Lotan, G. (2011). Data reveals that “occupying” Twitter trending topics is harder than it looks. Giladlotan. com, 12. Lovell, T. (2003). Resisting with authority: Historical specificity, agency and the performative self. Theory, Culture and Society, 20(1), 1–17. Marquand, D. (2004). Decline of the public: The hollowing out of citizenship. Blackwell Publishing. Mavrodieva, A. V., Rachman, O. K., Harahap, V. B., & Shaw, R. (2019). Role of social media as a soft power tool in raising public awareness and engagement in addressing climate change. Climate, 7(10), 122. Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, D. (1995). The end of public space? People's park, definitions of the public, and democracy. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 85, 108–133. Monterde, A., Calleja-López, A., Aguilera, M., Barandiaran, X.  E., & Postill, J. (2015). Multitudinous identities: A qualitative and network analysis of the 15M collective identity. Information, Communication & Society, 18(8), 930–950. Murray, J., & Mohdin, A. (2020). ‘It was empowering’: Teen BLM activists on learning the ropes at school climate strikes. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/11/ school-­strikes-­were-­empowering-­teen-­black-­lives-­matter-­activists-­on-­their-­environmental-­ awakening-­extinction-­rebellion

References

97

Nye, J. (2004). Soft power: The means to success in world politics. Public Affairs. O’Day, R., Slater, D. H., & Uno, S. (2018). Mass media representations of youth social movements in Japan. In Social movements and political activism in contemporary Japan (pp. 177–197). Routledge. Patrickson, B. (2020). Editor, Special issue on Eco-pedagogy and digital nature connections. Digital Culture and Education, 12, 2. https://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/volume-­12-­2 Peace News. (2020, August 7). African school strikers. https://www.peacenews.info/node/9574/ african-­school-­strikers Poell, T. (2020). Social media, temporality, and the legitimacy of protest. Social Movement Studies, 19(5–6), 609–624. Poell, T., & Rajagopalan, S. (2015). Connecting activists and journalists: Twitter communication in the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi rape. Journalism Studies, 16(5), 719–733. Poell, T., & van Dijck, J. (2018). Social media and new protest movements. In J.  Burgess, A. Marwick, & T. Poell (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of social media (pp. 546–561). Sage. Richardson, M. (2019, September 29). The teenage dip in nature connection and youth climate strikes. Finding Nature. https://findingnature.org.uk/2019/09/29/climate-­strikes/ Ryan, P. (2008). How new is the “new” social study of childhood? The myth of a paradigm shift. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 38(4), 553–576. Sandlin, J., Schultz, B., & Burdick, J. (Eds.). (2010). Handbook of public pedagogy: Education and learning beyond schooling. Routledge. Sandlin, J., O’Malley, M., & Burdick, J. (2011). Mapping the complexity of public pedagogy scholarship: 1894–2010. Review of Educational Research, 81(3), 338–375. Sandlin, J., Burdick, J., & Rich, E. (2017). Problematizing public engagement within public pedagogy research and practice. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 38(6), 823–835. Shirky, C. (2011, Jan/Feb). The political power of social media: Technology, the public sphere and political change. Foreign affairs. www.foreignaffairs.com Smith, M. (2019, September 15). International poll: Most expect to feel impact of climate change, many think it will make us extinct. YouGov. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/science/ articles-­reports/2019/09/15/international-­poll-­most-­expect-­feel-­impact-­climate Smith, E.  K., & Bognar, J. (2019). A window for climate action. https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/ handle/document/65376 Sullivan, J. L., & Transue, J. E. (1999). The psychological underpinnings of democracy: A selective review of research on political tolerance, interpersonal trust, and social capital. Annual Review of Psychology, 50(1), 625–650. Wahlström, M., Kocyba, P., De Vydt, M., & De Moor, J. (Eds.). (2019). Protest for a future: Composition, mobilization and motives of the participants in Fridays For Future climate protests on 15 March, 2019  in 13 European cities. http://eprints.keele.ac.uk/6571/7/20190709_ Protest%20for%20a%20future_GCS%20Descriptive%20Report.pdf Watts, J. (2019, December 20). Russian climate activist inspired by Thunberg is jailed. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/20/ russian-­climate-­activist-­inspired-­by-­thunberg-­is-­jailed Wright, W. (2018). As above, so below: Anti-black violence as environmental racism. Antipode. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12425 Youmans, W.  L., & York, J.  C. (2012). Social media and the activist toolkit: User agreements, corporate interests, and the information infrastructure of modern social movements. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 315–329.

Chapter 5

Part III: Utopia

What characterises the imaginary of utopia? What pedagogies of/for the future does it offer us? Following Abensour’s challenge to think of utopia as the space of education, of ‘desiring more, desiring better, and above all desiring otherwise’, how can we think of ‘the education of desire’ now and towards future utopias? These questions drive this final section of the book. It looks to themes in Afrofuturistic literature from Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor which speak to the previously articulated fears and hopes of youth and offer new ways of thinking, feeling, and even remaking ourselves towards alternative futures. The section suggests that these forms of fiction are more than curricular resources, and they are also pedagogically significant in their transformative potential for individuals and for disciplinary fields that wish to face up to the challenges of the Anthropocene. We do tend to think that we can achieve great things as a species. We just have to be willing to acknowledge what needs to be done to get there and sometimes the things that need to be done to get there are terrifying or can be terrifying to those in a position of privilege. N.K. Jemisin (Bereola, 2018)

5.1  Utopia as a Concept and a Method The problem with the idea of utopia is that it has come to be associated with political immaturity or naivety and is even seen as morally dangerous (Zamalin, 2019). In Thomas More’s 1516 work, the use of Utopia as a combination of a ‘good place’ (eu-topos) and a ‘no place’ (ou-topos) sets it up as unreal, more a place of longing than belonging. Even worse, the uncritical pursuit of utopia is seen as leading to totalitarian states featuring elements of surveillance, violence, and oppression – the very features that a utopia would wish to leave behind. Such warnings have been well set out in classic works such as Brave New World or Animal Farm. The perception of utopia is therefore as fundamentally unattainable or as flawed. Ursula LeGuin © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 E. Priyadharshini, Pedagogies for the Post-Anthropocene, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5788-7_5

99

100

5  Part III: Utopia

encapsulates this paradox perfectly when she claimed that ‘Every utopia since Utopia has also been, clearly or obscurely, actually or possibly, in the author’s or in the readers’ judgment, both a good place and a bad one. Every utopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a utopia’ (2017, p. 85). This level of fluidity and inconsistency signals the complexity in utopia and the inherent difficulties in working towards utopian futures. In contrast, Ruth Levitas, one of the foremost sociologists of the idea of Utopia (2011, 2013, 2017), sees utopia as a ‘making’ or a ‘doing’ project. She has called for it to be the serious subject of Sociology (rather than delegating it as a matter for Philosophy), claiming, ‘Whereas political philosophy may begin from such abstract goods as justice, fairness, or equality, the sociological approach forces the question of how these are played out in practice, how they are built into the design of social institutions and the actual processes of daily life’ (2017, emphasis mine). Such an emphasis on making and on social institutions opens the obligation of creating utopias to other social science fields too. This echoes the distinct ethic shared by the ‘social utopia’ ideas of Ernst Block (1986) and William Morris (2002, original published in 1890) and the earlier blueprint of Thomas More’s 1516 version of Utopia. It is less of an abstract good and more of something to be created and experienced starting in the present, rooted in alternative and radically reimagined social institutions upheld by appropriate practices, and illustrating new sets of ethics and values. It is an all-encompassing, radical mode that treats ‘social arrangements, means of livelihood, ways of life, and their accompanying ethics as an indivisible system…’ (Levitas, 2017). This is clearly ‘cathedral thinking’, one where the details of the everyday need to be worked out alongside the grand vision for a future that one will likely not live to see. Such an orientation to utopia reveals the scale of ambition and magnitude of the task. Levitas lists three steps that set in motion, this journey to utopia – imagination/ desire for a better life, the social practices and institutions that shape our lives, and agency and actions that transform the future. Anderson (2010) names a similar set of elements as shaping any future, not just utopian ones: styles (imagination), practices, and logics (programmes/policies). In both cases, without the impetus and the ability to imagine and desire a better future, there can be none. The desire and hope that things can be otherwise is the defining characteristic of utopian thought. These must work in tandem with changes to institutions and practices and policies, which create a collective, public sphere, negotiated as the ‘common’. This brings together the youth concerns outlined in Apocalypse  – that there is no common  – and the youth attempts to create both a new public and a new aesthetic outlined in Revolution. This section therefore considers the making of the post-Anthropocene to be a utopian project that can be directed by youthful imaginaries. Attempts at utopia creation are necessarily never ending. The Utopian imaginary ‘enables a kind of double vision in which we can look not only from present to future, but from (potential) future to the present .... The distance from the existing state of affairs… allows us to judge what we are doing in the light of what we could or should do’ (Levitas, 2017). This criticality and distance from utopia leads to ‘provisional’ plans of a better future which must be negotiated collectively. This

5.1  Utopia as a Concept and a Method

101

kind of utopia is one that will always recede from the horizon because the future never arrives, and therefore the job of future building can never be finished. To Levitas, this quality of never-endingness must be central to our understanding because it is precisely what can keep the threat of dis-utopias at bay. Hence she suggests that utopia is best understood as a ‘method’ rather than a programme or plan. As the process of imagining a utopia stems from desiring differently from the present, it is worth paying closer attention to the idea of desire itself. Abensour (1999), following William Morris, describes such processes as constitutive of ‘the education of desire’ itself: ‘…we enter into Utopia’s proper and new-found space: the education of desire. This is not the same as a moral education, towards a given end: Desire must be taught to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire otherwise’ (Nadir, 2010, 29). To deny such education of new and different desires or to circumscribe them within old ways of desiring would be to succumb to repression or the infantalisation of desire (Guattari, 2005). But desires themselves are governable and governed. That is, utopian promises may themselves become forces of domination. Nadir (2010) draws on Abensour and the utopian fiction of Ursula Le Guin to caution, ‘To educate desire then is to teach that utopian longing can itself lead to new forms of domination as desire is arranged and rearranged again and again by power and discourse’ (25–26). This echoes criticisms of seeing affect/desire uncritically, as something that is asocial, as radically arising from the pre-cognitive and therefore as transformational in promising ways. These warnings suggest that we look at desire, not as inherently radical but ask how it arises, how it works, on what bodies/matter, what effects it produces, and what worlds it creates. The lesson from Abensour here is to remain open to the multiple possibilities and potentialities of new desires/utopias without foreclosing on any. As new utopias/ desires come into being, the injunction is to keep desiring ‘otherwise’, over and over again. Bryant and Knight (2019) write of ‘teleoaffects’, the quality of affects that guide futural orientation and provide a set of acceptable ends for actors. This quality of affect links with the agency of actors who must continually act to bring about these ends (which are not endings). Levitas calls this attempt to ‘live out in this world the relationships and practices that might characterise an imagined better future’, ‘prefigurative practice’ (2017). In all of this literature, the interwoven nature of imagination, desire, and action are exposed. While the philosophical take via Abensour insists on keeping open different possibilities and desires for utopia, and the sociological take of Levitas provides a framework from which to build utopias, neither seems to be particularly helpful for imagining what these alternative futures might ‘feel’ like for particular times, places, or bodies. Levitas, echoing Baldwin’s ethico-­ aesthetics (discussed in the previous section), insists that the utopian approach must also enable us ‘to imagine what it might feel like to inhabit it, thus giving a greater potential depth to our judgements about the good’ (emphasis mine) (2017). This ability to not just imagine alternatives but to imagine them in such vivid detail that we could feel ourselves experiencing it is an essential affective driver of judgements over action and thus desired transformations themselves. Zamalin even compares this depth of feeling to the affects associated with religion, ‘powerful, irrepressible,

102

5  Part III: Utopia

sometimes ecstatic feelings: of salvation, of being at home in the world, and of reconciliation with strife’ (2019, 6). And it seems that for inspiration for how we may understand, experience, revel in, and work with this affective component of imagined futures, we need to turn to speculative fiction. Thus far in this book, I have stayed close to youth narratives and actions to explore the imaginaries of apocalypse and revolution. But fleshing out alternative, new, radically different utopias with youth participants proved to be a hard challenge for an empirical methodology that was better suited to mirroring the past/ present. The weight of current concerns and fears meant that conversations and activities kept returning to the dominant present. The task of ‘shifting the intensities with which the future might be felt’ (Savransky et al., 2017, 12) towards utopian horizons felt impossible. In research encounters with young people, both space travel and technological advances featured as holding the potential for opening new futures but they were also rightly viewed with suspicion, wary of the dangers of repeating old sins in new worlds. They also noted that some seemingly ‘futuristic’ technologies were already here (robotic arms for instance) but did not seem to usher in any special ‘newness’ into the world. Speculative methods such as sending postcards from the future self to the present self or photo image-based future projections only elicited warnings from a post-apocalyptic or dis-utopian future. In this they were already displaying the utopian ethic of being cautious about these seemingly different worlds. But the ecstatic and irrepressible imagining of alternative did not materialise. In contrast, my reading of speculative fiction offered an immersive and intense experience of newness/nextness that seems able to feed new imaginings and desires for alternative worlds. It also seemed appropriate to turn to speculative fiction as an item to study and ‘study with’ as the ideas of space exploration and technology-induced newness have been much explored in this genre. Needless to say, this turn to speculative fiction was also facilitated by the repeated lockdowns of 2020, which hindered any reasonable way of working face-to-face with youth. Hence, these cultural texts became study companions during the uncertainties of that year. Most of all, they readily offered an immersive experience of utopian alternatives in ways that also spoke to the concerns and fears expressed by young people during the research – most notably, those of social division (lack of common worlds), inequality, environmental degradation, alienation from authorities, intergenerational discord, etc. Speculative fiction also offered new and fresh imaginings arising from social and planetary concerns, particularly forms of Afrofuturistic (and African Futuristic) science fiction and fantasy which insist on rewriting the mythologies of colonialism and slavery that underpin current dystopias. Their foregrounding of exploitative histories in imagining new worlds also enacted a vigilance of the caution about how desires can come to dominate in newly oppressive ways. This form of fiction also exemplifies Levitas’ description of the ‘Imaginary Reconstitution of Society’. The method for such reconstitution consists of three modes: the architectural mode, which comprises the imagination of an alternative society and the plans for building it; the archaeological mode, whose role is to subject utopian models to critique and act as a brake to the creation of potential

5.2  The Utopias of Afrofuturism

103

dystopias; the ontological aspect  – meaning that all utopias contain assumptions about reality, the good life, or what it means to be human, which need constant examining. In his book Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin (2019) brings the archaeological mode to life when he returns us to a particular scene of European Enlightenment when non-European people of colour and Africans in particular were excluded from human subjectivity (most notoriously in Hegel and Locke). As a result, black utopian thought needed to enact the architectural mode, it ‘needed to seize a space of imagination from which they were barred and imagine a new humanity from which they were excluded’ (p. 11). Hence the reason why black utopias have continually ‘announced their claims without seeking prior approval, why they mixed different narrative genres, emotional registers, and eclectic theoretical sources in their futuristic visions, and why history and identity became unavoidable sites of inquiry and terrains of engagement’ (p. 12). In doing this, they also question the ontologies of normative futures. Such a distinct and necessary break from established norms of imagining utopia creates the sorts of conditions for more socially just, ecologically aware, posthuman utopias that feature in Afrofuturistic fiction. These elements can speak directly to young people’s concerns, particularly around continuing monstrosities, and can do so in entertaining and educative ways that stimulate the imagination about possible alternative futures. Black utopian thought is distinctive from other traditions for the reasons mentioned above, and crucial for creating any future worlds as it is necessarily much more critical and infused by ‘a sense of tragedy’ – a sense that is a useful caution against the slippage from utopia into dystopia, when domination of some by others becomes systemic. Struggle and subversion have to be essential components, and post-racism (not post-racialism) is vital in choosing the ‘terms of life not bound by white expectations’ (Zamalin, 2019, p.  12). Lived experience and historicity are combined in theoretical reflection rather than the focus on an abstract utopia for a generalised ‘human’ comfort. In doing so, black utopian thinkers also strike a blow against the uncritical positivism embedded in knowledge production, by defiantly retaining elements of spiritualism and transcendence that exceed Enlightenment rationalism. It seems that if utopias are to work on ontological, architectural, and archaeological modes, then black utopian desire offers immense potential for radically altered, equitable, and sustainable futures.

5.2  The Utopias of Afrofuturism The science-fiction and fantasy (SFF) genre occupies a special niche in the world of fiction. A popular and growing genre across multiple forms and media, it is most often assumed to involve robots, flying cars, or colonies on Mars. As this section will show, the genre is much more wide ranging and has shown itself to be immensely capable of offering fantastic utopias that can speak to youth concerns. The works of most SSF authors recognise ‘wicked’, seemingly unresolvable issues such as climate change or global pandemics or persistent racial/class/caste injustice, and the

104

5  Part III: Utopia

speculative form allows them to deal with such matters with more ‘fabulation’ (Deleuze, 1995) than the realist genre. The ‘cognitive estrangement’ offered by the speculative genre (Suvin, 1979) famously permits a break from realism, making room for inventive aspects (Michael, 2018) that allows an interrogation of what it means to be human and humane and to engage with posthumanist ideas (Bradley, 2017). The SSF genre thus animates and illuminates academic theorisations around posthumanism, materialism, affect, and many other concepts. They give us room to consider the debates around new materialisms – both as a necessary expansion of analytics and theorisation required to attend to the crisis of the Anthropocene and the dangers of challenging human exceptionalism without a consideration of black lives and bodies as matter(ing) (Leong, 2016; Ahmed, 2008). Though they are not written to ‘teach us a lesson’, the creation and populating of alternative worlds opens a number of future possibilities in ways that allow us to discern the pedagogies of a utopian imaginary. I have chosen to focus on some selected works of Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okarafor.1 They are award-winning, genre-busting authors whose works possess a critical utopian perspective. Labelled collectively as ‘Afrofuturism’, this literature is drawn from a black and/or an African consciousness that is cognisant of cruel histories and the ever-present inheritances of the past, from the perspectives of the enslaved, colonised, or other minorities. As a subgenre of SSF, Afrofuturism centres non-Western orientations and uses the motif of African and black mythology to provide a critique of injustice in a global capitalist world where white supremacist ideas are refusing to die. Afrofuturism aims to ‘reclaim and transform the trauma of past atrocities against the black and Afro-queer diaspora’, and thus the act of imagining is both ‘a strategy to understand the nature of cruelty, and how we negotiate with cruel acts as constitutive of our greatest aspirations’ (Brooks, 2018, 101). In other words, they offer us an unflinching reckoning of injustices past and present, without which any future imagined utopia would ring hollow. Ashcroft writes of broader postcolonial utopianisms as a prophetic vision ‘of what may be possible outside imperial structures such as linear time. Time spirals in these texts, in a circular movement that layers memory and the future much like what Jameson calls archaeologies of the future’ (2017, 15). It is this feature of combining the archaeological mode with the architectural and ontological that makes this ‘what if’ genre so rich an arena for learning. In the works discussed here, at times these themes are visibly foregrounded in the stories, and at others they recede in the melee and thrill of adventure. But they always act as reservoirs of hope in the present when apparent advances in progressive laws and norms are threatened by a resurgent white nationalist/supremacist imaginary. As has been noted, black women are the ‘unfortunate experts’ of 1  I felt the need to summarise plots and essential elements within these works in this section. I apologise for any (minor) spoilers; I could not always find a way around this. My summaries are also not presented in the same sequence as plots in the novels, so they inevitably disrupt the flow of author narratives set to maintain suspense. Needless to say, these are all works that deserve to be embraced and enjoyed in their full, original versions.

5.2  The Utopias of Afrofuturism

105

survival – not always through heroic, victorious battle, but equally through underestimated strategies involving resignation, sacrifice, accommodation, and assimilation (Kilgore & Samantrai, 2010, 355). This may be why these envisaged futures centre black female experience, perspective, and desires, while not being exclusively black in their world-making. The minoritised status of their protagonists is invariably used to amplify their propensity to recreate their worlds. Most of the protagonists are young black women or children, yet only some of these works are classified by publishers and authors themselves as young adult literature, a useful reminder that learning from youthful perspectives is an important resource to fashion responsible adulthoods too. The world-building talents of the authors allows for the creation of unforgettable characters that strive to create better worlds when faced with the imperfections and failures of their own. In this, they demonstrate the claim that Afrofuturism is both an aesthetic and a framework for critical theory because it melds together science fiction, history, fantasy, magic realism in a non-Western, and Afrocentric speculation about the future. It is a ‘total envisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques’ (Womack, 2013, 9). The texts chosen for inclusion in this section focus much less on cyborgs or robotics or other tech-utopian objects and much more on worlds with sentient objects, healing plants, shape-­ shifting beings, porous bodies, and fabulous aliens pre-occupied with recognisably ‘human’ dilemmas. These narratives also echoed the kinds of issues that young people worried as repeating in the future (outlined in Apocalypse). For instance, the particular young people I worked with were less keen on imagining futures populated with robots or driverless cars or other mechanical/technological objects and more concerned about the mundane, social, and cultural divisions that would follow into the future. The cognitive estrangement created by these fantastic SFF worlds offers thinking space to consider dilemmas and tensions on planet Earth as we know it today, and one equally full of learning moments for how we might imagine and build better futures that are not too reliant on tech-utopian rescues. The works of the three authors also demonstrate their commitment to creating SFF worlds as Black women authors working against the odds,2 and this is itself, a visibly utopian performative. The three authors have distinctive approaches and styles within the broad umbrella of SSF. Okorafor draws on her identity and cultural background as a Nigerian-American and Jemisin as an African-American. Butler, writing in an earlier age when such identities were discouraged by publishers and marketers, nevertheless relied on African-American protagonists and situations which recall in subtle and explicit ways, the condition of slavery and forced diaspora. Moore’s thesis on Afrofuturistic Utopias supplies the clearest argument for the educational and pedagogical potential of the genre: 2  The controversies around the Hugo Awards which celebrate writers in the SSF genre are illustrative. They usually centre around the early-mid 2010s when conservative and alt-right fans formed voting blocks to resist the ‘politicisation of the genre’ and its increasingly inclusive/multicultural roster of nominees and award winners. Although unsuccessful, these attempts attest to the contests within the world of SSF.

106

5  Part III: Utopia

Since it is impossible for a total reclamation of nativist or nationalistic sentiments due to forced migration and colonialism, black writers within the diaspora must constantly imagine history and time where pockets of it have been completely erased due to the existence of chattel bondage and trauma. This process is transformative and therapeutic, not just for the race or cultures from which these stories generate, but for all who participate in learning to acknowledge the past in order to see beyond it. Thus, black SF/fantasy literature gives space for teachable moments: the writing becomes pedagogically valuable to our present experiences. (2018, p.3)

The pieces used in this section envision new horizons, the novum promised by the genre of science fiction/fantasy that exceed the constraints of past and present inheritances, and in turn prompt questions about possible novum for educational and youth futures.

5.3  Octavia Butler’s Critical Utopia Butler, like other writers of dystopian fiction, uses the monstrosities of the present and extrapolates them in stories set in the future as a warning. Butler’s novels are continually being described as ‘prescient’ for their uncanny closeness to contemporary life in the West/USA and noted for producing more of a ‘shock of familiarity’ (Dubey, 1999, 105) than the estrangement which is usually associated with speculative fiction. She claimed that everyday news was her main inspiration for stories that show how ‘today’s dangers grow up to be tomorrow’s disasters’. In this, her stories demonstrate a ‘map, warn, hope’ strategy. Cognitive maps set the scene, describing familiar dystopian elements whether in political organisation or personal experience; warnings sound alarm bells over how present trends could evolve into dystopian futures by situating them in recognisable practices and social institutions; and hope lies in the openings in her stories that offer a glimpse of alternative possibilities. However, the dystopias are so immanent that her characters usually strive and keep failing in reaching for better alternatives. Where they display utopian impulses, they are grounded in gritty, tough conditions. Butler’s oeuvre is large, much loved, very well researched, and commented upon already. The aim here is to focus on those works that echo some of the concerns voiced by young people in the course of my fieldwork (discussed in the previous chapters on Apocalypse and Revolution) and which offer a consideration of the condition of youth itself. The Parable of the Sower (2012a) first published in 1993, The Parable of Talents (2012b) published in 1998, and Mind of my Mind (2012c) published in 1977, have been chosen for these reasons.

5.3  Octavia Butler’s Critical Utopia

107

5.3.1  Mapping the Terrain The parables were published through the 1990s and set about 30 years later in the 2020s, to a dystopian backdrop of climate change, inequality, and hypercorporate reach. In Sower, the America depicted is one where governments have abdicated their responsibilities to private global corporations, people exist in extreme inequality and the environment has no protection. Libertarian views of small government and free markets have triumphed. There is scarcity, racial conflict, and decimation of small local communities (previously centred around local church and neighbourhood) with few prospects for improvement. The American Dream of rugged individualism and meritocratic reward has disintegrated and LA’s suburbia lies in ruins. Private companies run towns and communities; many are walled/gated and protected by private, armed, security. Life outside the communities is brutal and dangerous, but even within the communities, there is a fierce defence of the independence of each family to the extent that no one speaks out against a man who enslaves his four wives. The veneration of individual independence is at the cost of common ground and solidarity, with no collective life, public space, or any sign of civic society within or outside such ‘communities’. The cause is long-term socioeconomic deprivation and social precariousness which has engendered distrust in the ‘common’ and the government has abandoned any obligation to provide for health, housing, or employment for its citizens. In short, the category of citizen which evokes the polis itself seems to have faded. Butler’s parables have been described as a ‘prophetic critique’ and a ‘reversal of American investments in freedom, political order and moral virtue’ (Zamalin, 2019, 124). The picture painted uncannily echoes a series of youth concerns today – the lack of common ground, culture wars, poor health provision, precarity in the labour market, and poor security. In Talents, the sequel to Sower, the space abdicated by government is filled by a moralistic Christian right and the segregation of state and faith collapses to devastating ends. The figurehead is Senator Jarrett, a presidential candidate, who promises the return of morals, values, and ‘law and order’ to America. However, this brand of Christianity involves ‘crusading and converting, exclusion and denigration’ (Stillman, 2003, 16), leading to a ‘you’re either with us or against us’ environment that brooks no dissensus. This religious fundamentalism depoliticises structural problems of this society and moralises them, with salvation offered through adherence to orthodoxy (Zamalin, 2019). This leads to the emergence of a new hierarchy governed by a rigid male patriarchy. Armed ‘Crusaders’ in tunics with crosses run amok, consolidating the power of a new ‘Christian Army’. The crusaders kidnap children and place them with families within the Christian Army, echoing historical abductions of aboriginal and slave children and contemporary separation of migrant families in various continents. This new army captures and fits community members with slave collars and turns their former community setting into a concentration camp where ‘re-education’ takes place. Some seek solace behind ‘virtual reality’ masks, others seek to migrate north to Canada, and very few seek to enter mainstream politics to effect change. Butler provides a critique of a decaying system

108

5  Part III: Utopia

based on intolerance and enslavement from the perspective of survivors who seem to share their condition with youth in not having access to the levers of power, and whose survival requires sacrifice, resilience, courage, and compassion to find a way to better worlds.

5.3.2  Creating the ‘Common’ Arising out of this dystopia is Butler’s protagonist, a young black woman, Lauren Oya Olamina whose purpose at the beginning of Sower is simply to survive: ‘I intend to survive’ (Butler, 2012a, 51). Living in a gated community in Los Angeles, her family is attacked and murdered, leaving her to attempt to form a new community. She is a ‘sensitive’, one who senses people’s pain. Her talent for hyperempathy and a capacity to share allows her to slowly find solidarity with similar souls. The chaos of world events and the murder of Olamina’s family becomes ‘a call to provide a painful, new beginning and a call for a new future’ (Brooks, 2018, 102). She rejects the old mantras of individualism, neighbourhood loyalty, property ownership, and the nuclear family to forge her own path based on her sense of community. In times of heightened fear and mistrust, she succeeds in building her community, by seeking out those who will support her vision and this includes diverse individuals and families of all ages, races, sexual orientations, skills, and experiences. Her sense of community becomes rooted in a desire to survive, finding common ground, conscious interdependence, and the voluntary agreement of community members. This cultivation of the ‘common’ in times that are inimical to the very idea is the utopian potential and promise of this work. This is a theme that reappears in different forms throughout Butler’s works. In Mind of My Mind, the idea of a telepathic community is developed in the context of adolescent transition. The transitions during adolescence in this book involve a particular moment when young humans get ‘activated’ (or remain ‘latent’) as telepaths. The novel’s antagonist, Doro the patriarch, is a being whose original body died four thousand years ago during his transition. Doro’s existence is a struggle for self-preservation which he successfully maintains by occupying different bodies through the ages and discarding each as they age, to find better hosts – he is a shapeshifter, a parasite, and a cannibal. He procreates telepathic humans hoping to form a race of superhuman telepaths. Doro feels threatened by Mary, who, as she transitions in her adolescence, accidentally activates an older human whose fate was to have been a ‘latent’. Her accidental triggering begins the start of a new networked community of telepaths who share a common subjectivity. Mary uses the metaphor of threads and patterns to explain this: all become members of a pattern, fragile threads that constitute the whole. Mary becomes both powerful and vulnerable in the moment of her transition, as she finds herself implicated within this network in which she must co-evolve with others. Here, adolescence and youth (for the activated ones) is a time of entering this form of networked, collective subjectivity – a form of independence and autonomy, paradoxically accessed only through interdependence, as ‘a collective enterprise

5.3  Octavia Butler’s Critical Utopia

109

with the world’ (Donner, 2018). In both the Parables and in Mind of my Matter, the trauma of becoming independent, yet part of a collective, happens through a painful absorption of everyone else’s feelings. This entails an acknowledgement that notions of individual control/mastery are illusions, subjecting the subject to the normative structures of the collective. The ways in which the collective can adversely act as an ‘epistemic muzzle’, containing the ‘revolutionary potential of the subject’ are also explored in Butler’s novels (Donner, 2018, 11). As part of a wider networked subjectivity, Mary is open and vulnerable to others in the network and at the same time responsible for them. The ties to others, the obligations to them, are also ways of being dispossessed of a free and autonomous self. This is a subjectivity enforced by interconnectivity, and one which demands a high ethical standard of relating to different others. Butler thus ‘invites a reconceptualization of subjectivity understood not as an individual quest for uniqueness but as an ethical awakening to the presence… of an irreducible and infinite form of alterity’ (Donner, 2018, 4.) This conceptualisation takes us into posthuman notions of the body: one that is porous, not bound by skin and which is literally conjoined in its fate with other bodies/beings. In Mind of my Mind, Mary is a ‘symbiont’ (not a parasite), a being in partnership with her networked people (Ferreira, 2010). This bond is one of necessity as well as empathy and desire. The collective is the force through which (not against which) the subject and its autonomy emerges, contrary to traditional Western understandings of the adolescent subject (Donner, 2018).

5.3.3  Posthuman Theology In the parables, Lauren Olamina insists on the inevitability of change, and therefore the importance of understanding and shaping it. She imagines an alternative and acts on it, gathering around her like-minded individuals. They begin to trust each other, sharing knowledge, experience, and skills to survive in this new world. They make up their rules for survival – they decide not to kill unless their life is threatened, and not to steal other than for self-preservation. Acts of altruism and kindness secure new members for her community. There is no hierarchy, with members discussing and deciding on actions equally. This leads to her founding her own community Acorn, of about 60 members, guided by her religion Earthseed. Earthseed defines community as made through ‘free decisions and commitments, rather than a pre-existing entity that one is born into or to which one naturally belonged. The bonds of attachment create its boundaries, but those boundaries are elastic and shifting because its existence depends on action’ (Zamalin, 2019, 130). Humans themselves, in turn, are understood as varieties of connections. Going far beyond just building solidarity with the members of her community, Olamina’s empathy and ability to sense others’ pain becomes ‘a conduit’ to creating Earthseed. Olamina writes down her thoughts in verse form, and this becomes the scripture for Earthseed.

110

5  Part III: Utopia

Her religion is centred on understanding change as inevitable and therefore as capable of being grasped to bring about new futures. The religion’s task is to shape God (Change) itself. In fact, the use of the word ‘God’ itself is a device, as Olamina believes altruistic ideas seem to slip out of our memory/grasp, whereas the idea of God is more memorable. An important tenet of Earthseed is to seek a life beyond Earth and the solar system. Here too, she believes that a grander project, something stretching beyond everyday human preoccupations, such as space colonisation will give humans a greater purpose without which they are invariably reduced to narrow, petty lives. ‘All successful life is Adaptable, Opportunistic, Tenacious, Interconnected, and Fecund. Understand this. Use it. Shape God’ (Butler, 2012a, b, c, 111). After Acorn’s destruction by the Christian Army and the abduction of her daughter, Olamina begins a long search for her and in the process and discovers afresh Earthseed’s potential for humanity. Earthseed ends up as a major religion by 2090, which invests in education, grants, and space exploration. Earthseed appears to be an unusual blend of ‘Christian redemption, New Age ecoconsciousness, and secular transcendental humanism’ (Zamalin, 2019, 130). It is striking that what is presented as a ‘religion’ is, in fact, a faith in both a secular reason and empathetic interdependence. Its belief is in an evolution of life within the intimacy of its environment which shapes life and is shaped by it. Even the project of colonisation of space is about life evolving with the aid of biotechnology to live in new environments – an attempt to become more than the ‘smooth dinosaurs’ that humans have become. Some read Earthseed as a posthuman theology in which ‘the only telos for humanity is its ultimate undoing’ (Sorenson, 2018, 533) in that interdependence and interaction is what is believed to produce agency and action (rather than autonomy or self-sufficiency) (Stillman, 2003). This is a utopian dream to break the cycles of domination, hierarchy, and destruction which is presented as possible if enough followers adhere to the principle of Earthseed’s impulse to support evolutionary change.

5.3.4  An Unorthodox Politics The books are not unambiguously in favour of the protagonists, certainly in the case of Lauren Olamina. There are several moments when the reader is pointed to ‘flaws’ in the organisation and leadership of Earthseed. The fear of group infiltration and subversion is ever present. So while Olamina insists on a certain ethical bond between members who must act in a collective manner, being responsible for/to each other, there are disturbing moments when public shaming is used to police behaviour. What perhaps stops Olamina from emerging as a ‘cult leader’ are the many counter narratives that emerge in Talents, principally, the critical voice of her daughter Asha Vere who questions her domestic decisions and leadership style. Vere sees Olamina potentially as a ‘megalomaniacal religious fanatic incapable of fellow feeling’, someone who does not care about the fate of individual humans as much as the fate of humanity itself.

5.3  Octavia Butler’s Critical Utopia

111

These different perspectives on Olamina mean the reader has to struggle to resolve them, to grasp the identity and purpose of the protagonist. It seems that ‘Olamina and humans more broadly, are best understood as multivalent, fragmentary entities that derive their meaning and purpose from their relations with other human and nonhuman beings’ (Sorenson, 2018, 536). Vere, for her part, sees the space exploration initiative as a kind of escapism, an abandonment of more practical actions towards alleviating suffering on Earth. This is a critique of Earthseed’s and Olamina’s avoidance of overt political engagement. Olamina is also challenged over her decisions regarding the Christian Army  – she sues the Christian Army and decides to settle for an undisclosed sum as a compensation for the torture that she underwent with the Crusaders. Zamalin (2019, 132) comments on how this establishes Earthseed within an ‘American brand of pragmatism’ and ‘American instrumentalism’ and a commitment to self-preservation in traditional American style by even defending gun ownership for self-defence. The compensation from Christian Army allows Olamina to bank roll Earthseed, including training and education as well as spaceship building. Thus, while renouncing American individualism, Earthseed still remains attached to these other parochialisms that highlight a mistrust of government and traditional politics. Both Stillman (2003) and Zamalin (2019) note how Earthseed does not seize its moment to provide effective political opposition to Jarret, but instead focuses on expanding its movement through missionary work to recruit new members, and self-perpetuating itself as an organisation, within the political structures that exist. Curtis (2008) also observes this feature in other works of Butler (The Book of Martha and Amnesty), where fear is confronted by protagonists in various ways, but always through resisting the surrender/subsuming of their agency and sovereignty to other political institutions or authorities. This feature of Butler’s stories is analysed by Zaki (1990) as reflecting Butler’s persistent belief in the relations between the ruler and ruled always being unequal, characterised as one of dominance and submission. Butler’s own scepticism of both civil rights liberal integrationism and Black Power racial separatism (Zamalin, 2019) perhaps underlies this reluctance to provide a recognisable political solution in the Parables. Whatever the reason for the reluctance, it is clear that while Earthseed is intended to build a democratic future and is positioned as a revolutionary philosophy, in Sower, it nevertheless consistently ‘eschewed collective struggle against existing power structures’ (Zamalin, 2019, 130). This is an uncanny echo of concerns over the lack of youth activism noted in earlier scholarship (discussed in Revolution) their absence in community/ social organisations, their disaffection with traditional politics (as discussed in the chapter on Revolution), and perhaps a signal of misrecognition or incomprehension of the unorthodox frameworks guiding both. Perhaps a more convincing reason for this strategy lies in the dystopian context of the stories, a permanent state of crisis where exploring political solutions or relations through dialogic negotiation processes or democratic structures is a luxury that is not available. The scholarship on Butler’s brand of utopia – a realist utopia – suggests that Butler is notoriously diffident about providing recognisably political (i.e. orthodox) routes out of dystopia. She does not moralise or lecture or even

112

5  Part III: Utopia

direct. Conversations and think-along dialogues seem to drive most of the narratives. This becomes easier to understand as her narratives are written from a standpoint of the lowest, the most dispossessed and powerless with little recourse to material or political resources. The promise of a fuller utopia is thus never made or delivered as that would stretch our credulity, even as readers of SSF seeking utopian resolutions. Butler’s commitment to speculate but only on a trajectory that very closely echo’s present trends lends more realism to her narratives. By her own admission, in her novels, ‘everybody wins and loses something’ because that is the way of the world.

5.3.5  Radical Imagination and Unorthodox Pathways The Earthseed destiny is analysed by Sorenson (2018, 535) as a version of ‘affirmative speculation’, where the future is open, unstable, and resistant to efforts to model or predict it. Olamina’s posthuman speculation is that ‘[o]ur new worlds will remake us as we remake them’. This includes thinking of humanity as ever evolving in response to the world around. Therefore the creation of utopia is a protracted and everlasting project, one where ‘humanity’s future is radically contingent on the project of dismantling and repurposing the human itself’ (Sorenson, 2018, 535). Butler’s stories are imbued with the belief that the fear of insecurity need not be resolved/removed by more powerful others (Curtis, 2008). The plotlines of her narratives are full of unusual routes to salvation, such as dreams (in The Book of Martha for instance) which help characters see the world for what it is. The ability to see more clearly one’s position and what is missing in that world allows characters to recognise the gap between aspired worlds and present worlds. This moment of ‘waking up’ to harsh truths of self and the world is the condition for the opening of better worlds (Curtis, 2008, 427). The lesson from Butler’s experimentations with alternate worlds is that our desire for order, classificatory language, and hierarchising between different humans, or human and non-human is to be abandoned in favour of an acceptance of a continuous mutation, a perpetual evolution in a random manner. Attempts to flee or expand the boundaries of the human body seems to offer the more radical alternatives for future utopias, through, for example, pro-creating with aliens (in Dawn or Rites) or evolving into beings suited for interstellar travel (in Talents). The embrace of difference and strangeness can help remake the human. ‘Co-presence, mutation and fluidity’ are prerequisites of this kind of human (Donner, 2018, 22) and crucially, the condition of youth, or adolescence more precisely, through its instability, openness, and vulnerability, is a worthwhile site for this rethinking. Butler has sometimes been read as offering a ‘weak’ form of Afrofuturism, for although her works display a black utopian sensibility, they do not explicitly project the social or political survival/triumph of traditionally racialised communities. However, this critique is itself open to charges of defining a narrowly precise and recognisable politics for Afrofuturism. Her works work against the dangers of

5.4  N.K. Jemisin’s Sensory Utopias

113

triumphalism or a naïve utopianism by choosing to focus on the change and adaptation of the posthuman body as a possibility for different futures. The taken-forgranted human body is shown in all its ‘porosity’ even across seemingly ‘unbridgeable biological barriers’ (Kilgore & Sumantrai, 2010, 357). Themes of variations on the human body and its dependence on the process of symbiosis for survival are repeated across her works. For Butler, the paths that lead from such openings are rarely rooted in social revolution or political restructuring but in how characters recognise fear and negotiate the terms of their condition. There is no pushing or directing but a form of education that is ‘forward looking and unvarnished’ (Curtis, 2008, 414). This is the pedagogy of utopia that Octavia Butler offers us. It pays attention to an unorthodox politics and, in this, feels novel and youthful in its rejection of established methods. The critique of hierarchy, love of different (even strange) forms of life, attempts at remaking the human (bioengineered hybrids), and evolution of community reveal rich grounds for further imaginings appropriate to the post-Anthropocene.

5.4  N.K. Jemisin’s Sensory Utopias Jemisin’s works feel the most overtly political of all three authors and thus poses different questions about possible utopias. Like the other two authors, her protagonists are usually black women, and her characters exhibit features of colour and inhabit worlds of colour. They are rarely utopian to start with, but the narrative arc draws us ever closer to altered futures through the actions of the protagonists. The Broken Earth Trilogy and the short story ‘Those who stay and fight’ are the two sets of works explored here. They speak to issues of whether small individual sacrifices can be exchanged for a better life for all and of posthuman sensibilities that can engage with seemingly ‘inanimate’ materials in new ways that can sustain non-­ extractive relations as a route to a new utopia.

5.4.1  Refusing the Suffering of Others ‘The ones who stay and fight’ (Jemisin, 2018) is closely related to Ursula Le Guin’s (1973) ‘The ones who walk away from Omelas’. Both writers are award-winning, undisputed greats of speculative fiction, who explicitly see their craft as a critical tool that can illuminate and question social injustice in contemporary societies. Reading these two side by side can allow us to see what they can tell us about the possibilities and limits of utopia. While some see Jemisin’s tale as a rebuttal to the 1973 ‘original’, Jemisin herself has described her story as a ‘pastiche of, and a reaction to’ Le Guin’s story. The titles themselves suggest different responses that dystopias can elicit – walk away, or stay and fight. Reading the two stories together, however, makes these differences less stark and reveals more overlapping concerns.

114

5  Part III: Utopia

Reading the two as companion pieces allows us to consider the conditions of utopia, its challenges, and responses, as envisaged by these two authors. This back-and-­ forth reading allows us to observe some pedagogies of the utopian imaginary. In Le Guin’s story, Omelas, the utopian city is celebrating a festival. The narrator invites you, a stranger, into the scene, and describes the wonders and joys of Omelas. It is shiny bright and joyous. There are no kings or slaves or stock markets or soldiers or bombs. The narrator suspects that there were ‘singularly few’ rules or laws. They repeat that the citizens are not simple, naïve, bland, or childlike utopians, but as complex as ‘us’. You are invited to imagine every good, or indeed every vice (free sex, beer, non-habit forming drugs, even religion without clergy) you may choose to enjoy as existing here. An inclusive utopia for all. Or so it seems. Sensing a scepticism of this ‘too good to be true’ world, the narrator relents and explains the secret that is foundational to Omelas – a terrified, hungry child living in confusion and misery, in a damp basement or cellar, the size of a tool room or broom cupboard. The child appears to be 6, although it is 10. ‘…the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, and sometimes speaks’. ‘I will be good’, it says. ‘Please let me out. I will be good!’ Citizens, usually the young, between 8 and 12, are regularly brought in to see the child and to learn the truth about their society. Malnourished, filthy, and covered in sores, this stunted and miserable child is the price that is being paid in order that other citizens can maintain their cornucopia of riches and joys: ‘…they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery’. For this ‘utopia’ to exist for some, someone else, somewhere else, must be exploited: ‘…If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms’. There is no alternative. Occasionally, someone balks at the inhumanity and injustice. They refuse to participate in this brutality towards the child. Their only choice is to walk away. They walk away into the unknown. The story ends with the enigmatic phrase that those who choose to walk away ‘seem to know where they are going’. Several generations of readers, students, and literary/philosophical scholars have pondered the meanings of the story. As many online fan forums continue to discuss its ‘moral’. It seems that one popular interpretation is that the child symbolises modernity’s discontents. While the child is a symbolic figure, it is emphatically not an adult figure. This figure is poignant precisely because of our associations of innocence and protection with childhood. The hunger, the sores and the terror of the innocent pile an unbearable pressure on the beneficiaries who must accept this misery to retain their utopia. The citizens in turn are described as complex: ‘mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched’. This insistence that the citizens are not simple souls but fully intelligent adults underlines the strangeness of their acceptance of the child’s misery. The story suggests that the glittering achievements of the big cities of the world are built on suffering and oppression,

5.4  N.K. Jemisin’s Sensory Utopias

115

both historical and contemporary. There is no possibility of full reparation or even a token compensation when generations have perished in the making of these shining cities. The suffering is immanent, inbuilt into the utopia. Everyone either knows and accepts this or, at least, is able to ignore these foundational sins and feel no guilt. Le Guin delivers an exposé of modernity itself, and perhaps its founding sins of slavery, colonialism fuelled by greed and startling lack of empathy or ethics when faced with the suffering of others. The minority who find this unacceptable are no longer part of this social consensus; they must ‘leave’. Their departure could be read as an ideological one. However, the story does not offer any easy endings as it insists that those who walk away in search of a more just world seem to do so in singles, never in large numbers or as a united or coherent group that can engineer political or system change. Readers must conclude that the utopia of Omelas is an illusion and that a genuine utopia is too difficult to accomplish on these faulty foundations. A wholesale rejection of the grand narratives, a walking away from Omelas, is the only way out. The depth of feeling and the non-compromise of walking away feel like a youthful response: what else might one do if one cannot (yet) influence the state, its institutions or its structure. In Jemisin’s version, a different response is imagined. The city of Um-Helat is another apparent utopia where there is no hunger, where knowledge is valued across the many fields, as are its worker-citizens, whether they be merchants, farmers, or technologers. Difference is valued, and all are polyglots. There is kindness and pleasure and joy because every soul matters. It is anathema to think otherwise. The narrator also senses the reader’s scepticism and seemingly mocks this disbelief. Why can this not be true? Why would you not want this to be true? And then goes on to reveal the mechanisms by which this utopia is maintained. It appears that another Um-Helat had existed in the past. One which did not value difference and saw some lives as more valuable than others. It was ravaged by wars and unrest. Distant ruins and half-buried missiles on the landscape pay testament to this past. Over time, Um-Helat turned away from that social vision and worked to build this utopia. The only problem is that citizens in Um-Helat can access information about another world, one where injustice is still the norm, where hierarchies exist and life is differently valued depending on where you were placed in the hierarchy. Um-Helatians have declared this information illegal, but persistent underground networks spread news of its presence. Once infected with this toxic knowledge, people may lose their allegiance to utopian Um-Helat and could behave in ways that will destroy it. Um-Helat therefore has ‘social workers’ who work these boundaries between the worlds, swiftly rendering justice by killing those who contaminate utopia with this toxicity. These social workers are armed and willingly patrol the boundaries. They have been ‘modified’ (signalled by the head studs embedded in their bald heads) so as not to pass on the toxicity to others in Um-Helat. There is a vivid scene where a law breaker faces swift justice at the hands of the social workers, rendered by a stab through his spine and heart (painless and quick). His young daughter who bears witness to this trauma cries and screams at the social workers, wowing revenge. The Um-Helatian way of dealing with this rebellious

116

5  Part III: Utopia

child is to quarantine her and through a long slow process of education, to bring her back into the fold, as a believer in Um-Helat’s laws and goals. In Um-Helat therefore, justice is swift and feels harsh, as one is presented with the choice of obedience or death. You are not allowed individual freedom to question the choices made by your society, decisions that have been made for the greater good. Dissenting from this choice is the one cardinal sin. Um-Helatians, however, distinguish between the adult and the child. They are more tolerant towards children who dissent. The model of the child in this utopia is a ‘knowing’ one. Yes, innocent but also questioning and critical of society’s choices. This child is not dealt with through a summary execution like her father, but through an education in quarantine. The city demonstrates its belief that every soul is saveable, that every soul is equally precious, through such procedures. The narrator draws us into this world to fight not just injustice for the good of the state/society but for the good of the child and its future. Both Omelas and Um-Helat suggest that the perfect utopian society is not achievable. But some evils seem more tolerable than others. In Omelas, suffering exists as the foundation for utopia and walking away emerges as the only alternative. A collective, ideological refusal could perhaps lead to new alternatives but there is no sign of this from the citizens. In Um-Helat we get to see how this collective ideological refusal is put into practice. Um-Helatians have collectively decided to stay and fight. They have come to the conclusion that inequality and exploitation are the root of all evil. They stay and fight to keep this idea of injustice at bay. Those who are punished are those who dared to bring toxic ideas into their utopia. Jemisin herself has noted the difficulties with imagining utopias, even for speculative writers. She has said ‘…science-fiction writers are supposed to be able to come up with futures. All futures. But the one thing I could not imagine was a society stemming from our own that was truly inclusive, truly egalitarian, and truly good for all people…’ (Bereola, 2018). This is the predicament of all who attempt to imagine such a wholesale utopia. It seems easier to look into and see a future perpetuating normal monstrosities than to look at it as a thought experiment for utopia. Researchers in futures studies constantly run into this challenge of a complete reimagination. In these stories, addressing one aspect at a time rather than a wholesale reimagination of being in the future feels more feasible. For instance, this short story, Jemisin felt compelled to address the assumption of suffering as inevitable. She says, Can you have a utopian society without somebody somewhere suffering? What would that life be like if no one suffered? And the only way that I could do it was to basically point out that the flaw is ideological. The idea that you have to have someone suffering is the flaw. So, this is a society that is utopian as long as they keep at bay the idea that somebody’s got to suffer. As long as they manage to fight off people who immediately assume that some people are less important than others and those people can be exploited. That is the danger. That is the toxicity. It’s not meant to be a society that’s perfect in every way. Obviously, people suffer in it. But the people who suffer are those who bring the contagion of suffering to others. (Bereola, 2018. Emphasis mine)

5.4  N.K. Jemisin’s Sensory Utopias

117

Both stories are designed to disturb complacency, to open our imaginations about the possibilities and pitfalls of alternate futures. Perhaps Jemisin’s Um-Helat could even be read as the utopia created by Omelatians who walked away. If there is always a price to pay, then Jemisin’s story asks us to consider whether individual liberty can be less valuable than the creation of equal freedoms for all. This is a Black utopia where no one is chosen in advance to be excluded from human subjectivity, where the sacrifices demanded of individuals are an acceptable price for the thriving of all life. It also illustrates the paradox articulated by Abensour and Nadir about utopian desire and its potential for domination. Both Jemisin and LeGuin, through different endings, show that the notion of the perfect society is impossible but that there may be a grander challenge in educating desire to desire otherwise from an inadequate present.

5.4.2  Sensory Materialism The Broken Earth Trilogy (Jemisin, 2015, 2016, 2017) also acts as a pedagogical resource at the Anthropocene in several ways. Like Butler’s works, these texts engage with those troubling issues to do with inequality, social division, and planetary concerns. Written from a black eco-critical perspective, they also bring to life ideas around new materialisms and posthuman explorations of bodies and matter. They bring together our fears about planetary futures and ways of responding to inequality and injustice while experimenting with alternative relations between living creatures and a lively/agentic planet Earth. These elements feed our imagination, allowing us to see and perhaps long for new forms of life and relations. The first book reveals an apocalyptic world, and over the course of the trilogy, we learn of how this came to be, and of the ways to bring about another world, one where the planetary and social problems are explicitly conjoined, and therefore have to be jointly resolved. The tales are set in a distant future, about 40,000 years away, on a planet Earth that is subject to perpetual uncertainty, plagued by frequent seismic activity, called the Seasons, leading to cycles of famine and death arising from a poisoned environment. We learn how the Seasons commenced after the ‘Shattering’, a catastrophic event that resulted in the moon being flung into a distant orbit, destroying tidal rhythms, starting a period of acid rains and climate catastrophe. Geologically, the planet is in a ‘lively’ state – by the time of the tales, all the continents have merged into one, called the Stillness. Socially, it is characterised as a society riven with divisions, ruled by the Stills, who exploit the Orogenes who possess genetic powers to control seismic activity. In evolutionary terms, the changes in the environment have caused a new organ to grow at the base of the skull of its people – the sessapinae which allows Orogenes to ‘sess’ or feel the Earth and its seismic activity. Book One establishes that a historical narrative has been established that attributes the causation of the Seasons to out-of-control Orogenes. This requires them to be taken in for training to control their impulses. This also gives the non-Orogenes reason to fear and hate them. Culturally, this is a world that uses

118

5  Part III: Utopia

mysticism and folklore (called Stonelore) to maintain a rigid caste-like system to ensure the enslavement of the Orogenes. During these seasons which can last decades, conditions worsen to the extent that communities (called comms) cannot rebuild their societies with any sense of scientific or technological accumulation of knowledge. Their path to consistent and incremental progress and growth is thus blocked, and technology is reduced to rudimentary forms. This is not a post-apocalyptic world but one where apocalypse is the norm, a world where prediction and preparation cannot guarantee survival. The inability to sustain progress or development leads to a series of dead civilisations, the ruins of which dot the landscape. The citizens lead an ahistoric existence, without being able to learn about or from the past. Survivors carry memories through selective recollections and myth. This is a world that lost its way, is mired in myth and a rigid social hierarchy. What is perhaps most distinctive is the depiction of the geological activeness of the planet, referred to as Father Earth, a self-conscious, active and motivated agent in its own right. Although not animated in the same manner as other bodies in the novels, Earth acts with sufficient distinction to be (finally) recognised as agentic. It is a living, conscious, and acting planet but not always noticed in this way by its inhabitants. Earth is furious because it has realised the extent to which it was being devoured by the Syl Anagists, a technologically advanced society, who occupied Earth in a previous age. The description of the Syl Anagist period bears a strong resemblance to contemporary life – this society had a moon base, could drill into the core of the Earth, bio-engineer new life forms, and was spread over 250 prosperous cities across the globe. Theirs was also a high-energy-consuming, racially stratified society that devised a way of extracting and storing energy from Earth’s core in the form of an obelisk network. This network of obelisks was suspended in the skies around the Earth, uniting all the cities in containing the core’s energy. Setting this up required the skills of genetically bio-engineered Tuners who could ‘tune’ into energy fields, a special technological knowledge which was appropriated from the genome of an indigenous people who were attuned to the Earth. When the Tuners were made aware of their humanity/personhood, they sabotaged the system in such a way that humans were nearly decimated. The Syl Anagists were oblivious to the fact that their bio-engineering had created a new form of life that had its own consciousness and was sentient and not just inanimate matter that worked the obelisk batteries. Syl Anagists also saw the Earth as inanimate and inert, a disposable resource that existed for human consumption. When the Earth found that its core was to be stolen and harnessed as an energy source, it understood this as yet another scheme of extraction and exploitation of its resources. In response, Earth had already sent its ‘tendrils of iron’ into the obelisk sockets so that when the network powered up, it was sabotaged beyond repair. Earth being indifferent to the distinctions between human and other forms, had its own plans to rid its crust of all life and stop its abuse. In the struggle between Earth, the tuners and Syl Anagists, the moon was shunted out of its orbit, destabilising Earth’s tilt and throwing the tides out of their rhythms.

5.4  N.K. Jemisin’s Sensory Utopias

119

Thus began the cycle of seasons – an act of revenge by Earth, which also resulted in Tuners being turned into Stone Eaters, a new stone-based life form. Jemisin thus delivers a series of warnings in her book – about a technological hubris driven by greed and based on extractive relations with both people and material environments; about the potential breakdown of technological and ecosystems; about believing that humans can wield supreme control; about the liveliness and agency of matter and non-human life forms with their own agendas; and about affluent lifestyles based on exploitation of others, near or far. Apart from showing how technology is racialised and riven with class/status, the books expose the problem with entrusting power in the hands of a particular class/group of people who may have peculiarly parochial views themselves (Iles, 2019). What the books illustrate are the possibilities arising from stepping beyond human comprehension as the framing logic of understanding reality. There are insights to be gained from seeking non-human representations of reality and of the human itself. In the trilogy, we experience an expansion of our horizons about what ‘Earth’ may be, and the place of life on it. They reinforce the ephemerality of human life on its narrow crust and how our consciousness, perhaps our ontological certainties too, are centred on this thin strip, while the Earth is much more than its crust, even much more than its singularity as a planet (Gerber, 2019). We are made to appreciate afresh how Earth is held in place and how the delicate gravitational balance with its satellite the moon and their reciprocal relations with each other hold all of life in this balance. In turn, the Tuners learn to move the Earth, through ‘deliberate’ and ‘specific’ communication. The books insist on the vitality and agency of Earth in connection with other bodies through what Gerber (2019) terms sensory materialism, an expression of vital materialism that recognizes the importance of the senses. Sensory materialism goes beyond emphasising the life and agency of matter; it reveals the necessity for an active and multi-sensorial relation with matter. It recognizes that such relations have been and continue to be affected by specific cultural and racial histories. This becomes part of the project of reclaiming African-American eco-relations. In these tales, Jemisin reveals how the protagonists (Orogenes) go through a process of education, learning about their histories of enslavement and how an extractive logic places them in opposition to both a lively Earth and the other beings on it. Such learnings also provide a path to altered and less exploitative futures in the books. The Orogenes have the ability (orogeny) to manipulate seismic power including preventing or diverting earthquakes through their sessapinae. They can sense  – sess – and act upon rocky matter and related events, such as tectonic shifts, volcanic eruption, earthquakes, seabed collapses, fault lines, magma chambers, and the paths of streams and rivers. They can even build dams of stone. They are closely tied to the Earth and its features both through the physiology of the sessapinae and through the honing of their skills through years of training. Orogeny emerges as relational and sensory, requiring a working together of the senses. It is a connection with the Earth and a way of listening. The listening is not through the ear, but through feeling: ‘she sees, though sessapinae are not eyes and the “sight” is all in her imagination’ (2015, 263; original emphasis). The power to

120

5  Part III: Utopia

sess is genetically coded, and not a racial feature, thus refusing any quick identification of Orogenes as exclusively black. While black or other characters of colour abound, orogeny is not bound by race. One of the protagonists, Syenite an Orogene woman, emphasizes the importance of touch along with her experiences of ‘listening to the earth’ and ‘see[ing]’ through it. Syenite comes to value this as a gift, learning not to envy the ‘normal’ Stills, thus breaking out of the dominant socialisation that she has been subjected to at the Fulcrum. Such lessons and realisations of the relationship between Orogene and Earth draws attention to how systems of ‘oppressive power restrict and control eco-relations’ (Gerber, 2019, 15). The books thus constantly turn our consciousness towards the interrelations between power and the geological state of the world.

5.4.3  T  he Dystopia of Social Hierarchy and Extractive Relations The world depicted in the books is clearly hierarchical, with the status of each group distinctly marked. The ‘Stills’ are the dominant group who have created a world where not being able to sess is prized as superior. Their creation, the institution called the Fulcrum, is led by the Guardians. At the Fulcrum, Orogenes are taught to control their powers and channel their abilities into less dangerous, more ‘useful’ paths, and to become a docile and reliable labour force. Popular wisdom suggests that the Orogenes left to themselves cannot control their powers and are a danger to the world. They are designated as sub-human, unable to handle independence. They have ‘no right to say no’ and are under threat of being maimed and killed if they did so. They also must not show anger as their anger makes Stills ‘nervous’. There is a widespread, cultivated fear and hatred of the Orogenes, who have been so thoroughly dehumanised and demonised as monstrous, that their hurt does not count and even their murder is justified. Youngsters unable to hide their powers of orogeny are even sanctioned for murder by their parents or their comms. Those Orogenes who are not yet discovered or those who escape from the Fulcrum must survive by hiding their abilities. The books written from the perspective of the Orogenes allow readers to sympathise with them. Their labour is exploited, their skills are controlled; in short, they are ‘coded and commodified for use without end’, exemplifying how ‘caste and race are social systems designed as veneer for the insidious order of industry and empire’ (Moore, 2018, 23). The Guardians themselves are children of Orogenes who are technologically modified through an implant in their brains. The implant alters their behaviour and abilities and sets them apart from both the Orogenes and the Stills. They are thus enlisted in the subordination of their people as they are the enforcers of the norms that keep them enslaved. They may be enrolled as ‘breeding partners’ with other Orogenes. By ensuring their acquiescence, and effectively blocking any sense of solidarity or caste/category consciousness from forming, the Fulcrum

5.4  N.K. Jemisin’s Sensory Utopias

121

secures an oppressive relationship over the Orogenes. The Guardians have distinct characteristics such as their ability to stop Orogenes from exercising their power and are therefore ‘different’, a fact that Guardians repeatedly reiterate. Some Orogene children are chosen to be ‘node maintainers’, placed under heavy sedation and plugged into machines that heighten and harvest their abilities to sess the environment and stop potential seismic destruction. A form of lobotomy is exercised on them to strip them of agency and consciousness but still retains their instinct which is manipulated by the system: The body in the node maintainer’s chair is small, and naked. Thin, its limbs atrophied. Hairless. There are things – tubes and pipes and things, she has no words for them – going into the stick-arms, down the goggle-throat, across the narrow crotch. There’s a flexible bag on the corpse’s belly, attached to its belly somehow, and it’s full of – ugh. The bag needs to be changed. (2015, 139; original emphasis)

This passage brings to mind the child in Omelas, the one who must suffer in a basement in order to maintain the idyllic lives of the citizenry. It also recalls a range of other figures that suffer a similar fate – the extractive labour endemic to slavery and colonialism, third-world sweat shops, or child labour in mineral supply chains for electronic goods today. The Fulcrum is shown to be surgically manipulating the children to become nothing beyond the instinct to quell shakes. Most Stills and Orogenes are unaware of the extent of the manipulation of node maintainers, illustrating how the hierarchy can obscure its cruelty, as well as any bursts of rebellion from the other members. The relationship between a node maintainer and the Earth is also obstructed, ‘restricting it to the node maintainer working the earth, just as an African American slave’s relationship with the land was restricted to working it for their master’ (Gerber, 2019, 16). When a young maintainer rebelled against his enslavement, he caused an earthquake which required the combined powers of the two Orogenes, Alabaster – the more experienced Fulcrum trained Orogene and Syenite, his younger ward – to quell. Syenite slowly learns of hundreds of such Orogenes who are used to control a violent Earth, under orders of the Fulcrum. She eventually joins Alabaster on an island outside the Fulcrum and gives birth to their son, Coru. This island, for a brief period, offers a glimpse of life without the Fulcrum, where Orogenes are free and allowed to run their own lives. This brief interlude provides another utopian moment, a speculative ‘what if’ moment, what if slavery and colonialism had left the world untouched? However, this respite is disrupted when Guardian agents from the Fulcrum discover the island, forcing Syenite to use her orogeny to protect herself and baby Coru from slavery, an act that ends in Coru’s death. Syenite cannot bear the prospect of Coru being enlisted into the hierarchy and into enslavement to perpetuate the lifestyles and the liberal ‘freedom’ that allows the Stills to flourish at the cost of Orogene suffering. Recalling Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Jemisin’s staging of the death of a child and a murdering mother warns us of current forms of oppression that may be obscured, as well as the dangers of social hierarchisation and attachments to ideas of biological/ethnic

122

5  Part III: Utopia

purity. Any utopian possibility can then only lie in a destruction of the social-­ cultural-­economic system that produces and reinforces this exploitative hierarchy. The parallels with chattel slavery are evident and have been analysed in detail in several works (cf. Walter, 2019; Murphey, 2018; Gerber, 2019). Orogenes are bred into captivity through a process of ‘unnatural selection’, hated for their existence, yet harvested for their labour. Without the Orogenes, Stills would not be able to exist. The term ‘slave’ is, in fact, used by Orogenes to describe themselves once aware of the workings of the system. One of the insights from the series is its illustration of how discrimination corrodes a society so much that inhumanity becomes normalised (Iles, 2019). Over time, people born into such structures are enlisted to contribute to their own racial and social oppression. They act against their own interests. As Jemisin states, this was an authorial intention: ‘I set out to write a world in which people who are powerful, who are valuable, are channelled into systems of self-supported and externally imposed oppression’ (Kehe, 2016). These authorial decisions by Jemisin are meant to emphasise the differences between the groups and the dysfunctional ways in which difference is not accommodated: … What I keep wanting to show is that people think the idea that a group of people is legitimately different and that therefore it’s legitimately OK to discriminate against them… this is not really the question that should be being asked. The question that should be being asked is, ‘why aren’t you more willing to accept these people’s difference?’ (Newkirk, 2016)

These questions that drive the trilogy bring to mind similar concerns in young people’s conversations (in Apocalypse) about difference and the lack of the ‘common’, as well as worries about worsening divisions that may be deepening social hierarchies. While the trilogy does not come to a quick and easy utopian solution, the slowly evolving plot draws readers into following the various ways in which awareness, knowledge, and a reluctant solidarity between the various elements/ peoples of the planet grow into a concerted action to attempt to resolve these seemingly irresolvable matters.

5.4.4  T  he Possibility of New Peoples and Non-extractive Relations The novels give rise to a range of ‘peoples’ such as the Stone Eaters (ancient Tuners turned into Stone Eaters by Earth), who are depicted as possessing some human characteristics (they are self-conscious, think, and act with free will) but have a very different physiology in that they are made of stone, eat stone, and appear not to age. They are able to adapt their bodily appearance to mimic human bodies, gender, and speech but only superficially. The Stone Eaters are not subject to the structures of caste and hierarchy; they are outside the circuits of the exploitative economy of the Stillness. What is of note is that these different beings – Stills, Guardians, Orogenes, Stone Eaters, node-maintainers, and Father Earth – each have a distinct existence. The novel uses the phrase ‘sentient non-humans’ to talk of these other beings. They

5.4  N.K. Jemisin’s Sensory Utopias

123

are all, humans and non-humans, referred to as ‘people’, thus opening up a ‘new category of beings whose sole named characteristic is sentience’ and while not breaking from humanist thinking, this construction nevertheless ‘argues against an anthropocentric thinking’ (Walter, 2019, 21). Just as in Um-Helat, this is a world populated with multiple forms of life within a rigid hierarchy, with the real enemy being the idea that systemic discrimination/suffering/exploitation on the basis of difference is acceptable. The context of the Broken Earth series is a complex one, both socially and geologically. It allows readers to imagine what it could be like to live in an uncertain, unstable environment, one in which the effects are felt differently if they are located in the ‘wrong’ category of being. Somewhat different from Octavia Butler’s style of close extrapolation of current trends into the future, this series offers a familiar set of challenges in estranged contexts and asks us to think along with the protagonists grappling with them. The setting echoes with recognisable problems of inequality, structural discrimination, and extraction of labour and resources and asks us to ponder how these could come to pass now or in stranger worlds. Exploring this future Earth through the combined frame of racial and ecological injustice, the books take us on a journey about how justice may be acquired now or in the futures we move towards. Orogene talent, nurtured through Fulcrum’s training, obscured their potential for better relations with matter and ecology. Rather than purely manipulating geology, in the service of the Stills, Orogenes always had the potential for generative and better distributive powers. But greener/better/more humane systems and cultures cannot arise from generalised utopian solutions; they need to be conscious of racial/ cultural histories and practices that govern relations with land, property, animals, or materials. The book’s ending is essentially about how the relations between all these diverse beings – the Earth, the Stone eaters, the Guardians/Stills, and the Orogenes – are resolved, a resolution that is both geological/planetary and social. While the Earth as a planet can and will survive without human life, human existence is much more vulnerable. Such vulnerability invites a cultivation of humility (Jasanoff, 2005) and a re-thinking of our ontological frames. For instance, the stories ask us to consider if the Earth should not be recognized as having its own rights (Iles, 2019). Indigenous communities for long have insisted that the environment and the Earth have existential rights that they ought to be seen as beings in their own right. What the books show so well are the interconnections between different battles for justice and how they are tied to the problems of a humanist, anthropocentric logic. By using the lens of race/caste, the books show the continuities of exploitative structures and make us pay attention to cultural histories in understanding matters of ecology and materialisms in ways that animate social theories/concerns related to the Anthropocene.

124

5  Part III: Utopia

5.5  Okorafor’s Africanfuturist, Decolonised Utopia There are a multiplicity of threads to follow in Nnedi Okarafor’s Binti trilogy (Okorafor, 2015, 2017, 2018). Many of them echo posthumanist themes found in Butler’s and Jemisin’s works and also differ substantially in how they are imagined and treated. In this final section I focus on Okorafor’s ideas that relate to indigenous materialisms, ecological hybridity, decolonisation, space, and belonging and how they work to create alternate, utopian possibilities. As with the other two authors’ works, the themes here also extend and illustrate concepts relating to posthuman ideals, educational institutions, and matters of the ‘common’ raised by youth as concerns about their future. Binti, the eponymous heroine, is from the Himba people of Earth, a marginalised folk who have a specific technological and mathematical skills anchored in their culture with which they trade with other tribes and peoples. Binti’s adventure starts sometime in the far future, when, against the wishes of her family and people, she absconds to take up her place in Oomza University. Her exceptional mathematical and inventor abilities have secured her a place in this most prestigious of intergalactic universities. The three novels follow her adventures to the university (book 1), a return home to be reconciled with her family (book 2), and a voyage back into space and the university (book 3). Along the way, she comes to ever deeper understandings of her relationship with other human groups, aliens, and vital, sentient objects across the galaxy. This is no bland utopia; these worlds are populated with warring groups, prejudiced folk with isolationist ideals, much like contemporary Earth. How Binti finds her way through this chaos with assistance from unexpected quarters and her growing awareness of the interconnected nature of being and how she ends up with a vastly expanded idea of kin and kinship make for an entertaining read that abounds with learning moments for readers.

5.5.1  Indigenous Materialisms A notable thread in academic discussions on new materialisms is the observation of how Western knowledge and knowledge producing processes have been fuelled by imperialism and a greed for making capital at the cost of human, animal, and ecological biomes that have been the foundation for the Anthropocene (Yusoff, 2018; Mirzoeff, 2016). Integral to this knowledge industry was the racialisation of humans, the objectification of indigenous bodies, and the denigration of their ways of making sense of the world. Dismissed as primitive or superstitious or non-positivistic and therefore as non-valid ontologies/epistemologies, indigenous knowledge and practices in medicine, astronomy, science, and art have largely been treated as ethnographic objects rather than as credible in their own right. Afrofuturistic fiction’s

5.5  Okorafor’s Africanfuturist, Decolonised Utopia

125

riposte to this has been to re-centre African mythologies, knowledges, practices, and objects as vital for imagining utopian futures. Okorafor’s choice of the Himba as the people of Binti is instructive in itself. The Himba today are a semi-nomadic group living in the Kunene region of Northern Namibia. A peculiar construction of them as isolated and geographically remote has attracted the attention of anthropologists and studies often contain the implicit assumption of remoteness as a signifier of ‘primitiveness’. Their tradition of wearing sheepskin clothing and practice of using red ochre on their bodies and a mixture of ash, ochre and butterfat on their hair to twine it, have mostly been treated as further proof of their primitiveness. Needless to say, more critical anthropologists have noted how such assumptions are simplistic, dismissive, and rooted in an inability to accommodate difference (Warnlof, 2000). But these assumptions have been instrumental in reifying notions of the centre and periphery, and the hierarchisation of life itself. What may be less well known is that the Namibian peoples (Himba, Nama, and Herero) were subject to a brutal genocide in early 1900s under German colonial rule, decimating lives and histories, with no subsequent recognition of this trauma nor any sign of reconciliation or reparation (Khan, 2012). That the Himba are chosen to be depicted as technological and diplomatic pioneers in the future rather than ‘perpetual victims of history’ (Moore, 2018, 60) is a utopian act from Okorafor. In the novels, there are striking similarities between these Himba and Binti’s Himba – most obvious in the practice of applying the red clay (‘otjize’) – to hair and bodies. Binti, throughout the novels, reveals her rootedness in her culture, her love for it, and insists on maintaining her cultural practices even when far from home, in the more cosmopolitan environs of Oomza University. The Himba are portrayed as particularly attached to their geographical location on Earth and rarely venture beyond their specific neighbourhood. This makes her arrival at the university a rare occurrence. Her mathematical abilities however soon establish her right to be there and she constantly establishes herself as a Himba, never giving up on her cultural identity, even down to the codes embedded in her hair patterns that signal her heritage. These acts both ‘Other’ her and affirm her uniqueness. The Himba’s knowledge is depicted as embedded in their culture and the roots of their expertise as historically deep, making their knowledge and culture inseparable. Binti emerges as academically gifted because of, and not in spite of, her tribal culture. Rather like the skills of the orogenes to ‘sess’ the Earth, the Himba’s skills are unique to them and also utterly vital to the majoritarian population which despises them. The Khoush are the majority people, prejudiced against the Himba despite their reliance on the Himba-made ‘astrolabes’ – technologically advanced communication devices. The Khoush seem to replicate many unsavoury acts that mirror practices in our world – for example, in an early scene they are seen touching Binti’s unusual, otjize adorned hair, overheard referring to the Himba as ‘dirt bathers’, and rebuke her for ‘staining’ the space shuttle with the otjize. Himba women’s anklets, traditionally wore to ward off snakes as well as an ornament, are also remarked upon, seen as a primitive sign of living too close to nature. This prejudiced reception follows Binti to the supposedly liberal and cosmopolitan Oomza University. Those around her seem to tolerate her difference as long as it does not inconvenience or

126

5  Part III: Utopia

irritate them (Payne, 2016). This critique of contemporary attitudes to difference that masquerades as tolerance of diversity in the university continues in both open and understated ways throughout the trilogy. The Himba are not just manufacturers of the technologically advanced astrolabe but are also portrayed as artisans whose craft skills are used in combination with their mathematical and technological knowledge. Payne (2016, 5) points out how the choice of the word ‘astrolabe’ is a political one, how it ‘unsettles western historical narratives of technological progress’, since ‘[i]t was within the Islamic world that [the astrolabe] developed into a precision calculating instrument and essential tool for any astronomer’ (Winterburn, 2011). This astronomical instrument predates the use of the telescope by over four centuries. In using the name of this instrument for the Himba peoples’ advanced futuristic communication technology, Okorafor resituates technological and intellectual progress as deriving not from the classical European – Greek and Roman thought – but from the ancient Islamic world. By integrating art, spirituality, and science into its crafting, the Himba showcase a different, pre-colonial understanding of everyday cultural-technological artefacts. Okorafor also confers healing properties on the otjize, which also works on Binti’s alien friend, the Meduse called Okwu. In book 2, Binti uses the otjize on Okwu to save his life and literally binds her relationship with the Meduse. Such culturally significant objects and practices continually play a key part in the narrative, displaying not just how integral they are to Binti’s sense of who she is, but as essential actors in the plot. Another scientific-magical object that plays a key role in the novels is the edan, an ancient device that Binti acquires in the desert, whose purpose remains unknown for most of the trilogy. It is a ‘stellated cube’ of unknown metal that seems to protect her from alien attacks and also allows her to communicate with the alien Meduse. It becomes her talisman through the novels and reveals its deeper layers (it later falls apart to reveal a golden ball) as the novel proceeds. The edan in Yoruba culture is a real artefact in the form of figurines with spiritual significance, and for use in liminal spaces to bring worlds together. Choosing the edan as an intergalactic communication device for the stories is yet another way in which Okorafor reinserts indigenous mythologies into the technological. The astrolabe, the edan, and the otjize all play their part as ‘vital’ non-Western cultural materials that shape the course of events through the novels as technologies in/of the future. In addition to these magical objects/materials, there is a metaphysical process too that Okorafor uses to infuse ‘fantasy’ with ‘science’ fiction. Binti uses the process of ‘treeing’, a way of focusing inwards, in a trance like state, through visualising mathematical formulas and equations in her mind. Through treeing, which needs to be learnt and applied, Binti was passed on ‘three hundred years of oral knowledge’ (Okorafor, 2015, 31) from her father. ‘This continuous state of applying oneself to increasingly difficult problems opens a pathway to a place that empirical practices cannot reach, broaching on a state of Nirvana’ (Moore, 2018, 67), a process described by Binti as getting closer to ‘God’ (Okorafor, 2015, 22). The utopian gesture here is in the display of a direct relationship between a mindful spiritual practice and scientific ability. Okorafor reminds us that the peoples of Africa have

5.5  Okorafor’s Africanfuturist, Decolonised Utopia

127

always been an integral part of the dialogue of civilization, progress, and academic knowledges. Her utopian vision also demonstrates that tribal metaphysical practices do not need to be perceived as being at odds with modern, secular science, striking a blow against Eurocentric positivism.

5.5.2  Ecological Hybridity The main alien species in the novels are the Meduse, who are blue, tentacled, and jelly-fish-like. They each possess a stinger as a weapon and for self-defence. There appears to be a long-standing dispute between the Meduse and the Khoush tracing back to a time when Khoush scholars had taken the Stinger of the chief Meduse and removed it to Oomza University museum for research purposes. It is implied that this has been housed for weapons research, presumably to be used even against the Meduse themselves. The Meduse have since sought to recover it but their violent efforts have seen them branded as terrorists. Binti manages to survive one of these attacks by the Meduse and finds herself in the position of having to negotiate with Oomza University to return the stinger and thus establish peace between the Khoush and Meduse. But this very act of diplomatic brokering is only possible when she opens herself up to the Meduse to earn their trust. In book 1, Binti has to exercise all her skills as a ‘harmonizer’ with the Meduse both to ensure her own survival and to win over their trust. Her understanding of the injustice to the Meduse is not sufficient for her, as that would make her a simple ‘ally’. To become fully engaged in their predicament and to act to resolve it, Binti needed to be stung, to become partly Meduse herself. This turns her otjize covered dreadlocks into blue tentacles (okuoko), like the Meduse. She expands her sense of kinship through this act and progressively becomes ‘invested’ in their joint fates. However there is more than the physical act of being stung that develops their relationship. The Meduse are not the ideal minority, they are equally capable of exploitation, violence, and domination as the Khoush, but through a process of negotiation and commitment to the terms and conditions of jointly relating, producing, and using knowledge, Binti and Meduse begin to be more than transactional partners. The uneasy and faltering steps towards each other’s position culminating in a sense of collective obligation to each other is as essential as Binti being physically stung and transformed, to be implicated in the situation. In book 2, Binti learns of her extended kin on her father’s side, the Enyi Zinariya, a desert people reviled as uncivilised/primitive by the Himba. The Enyi Zinariya themselves have a historical relationship with aliens and alien technology that gives them the gift of telepathic communication. This gift/ability does not pass on automatically to future generations but must be activated. Binti’s paternal grandmother activates this ability in her, affording her telepathic abilities with other kin across large distances. Binti experiences this activation process as a nauseating, destabilising one, but in the process comes to shake off her own prejudices about the Enyi

128

5  Part III: Utopia

Zinariya and appreciate their secret, unique knowledge that is now crucial to her own survival. Finally, Binti’s sense of kinship is extended further to material objects when she becomes tied to a living, bio-space ship (New Fish) in a literal sense. In book 3, when New Fish is able to repair her body and return her to life, this necessitates that they are never further apart than 5 miles of each other. She is now ‘paired with’ New Fish and learns of other paired beings, including some of the professors at Oomza University. Later she learns from her doctor that any children she may have in the future will be part Himba, part Meduse (with blue tentacled hair), and part New Fish. She is constantly being pushed at each of these encounters to become ‘more than human’, most often not by choice, but by circumstance and sometimes even a distinct lack of choice. Thus she is not a human protagonist who in full agentic energy chooses and shapes key relationships but is more often than not against her will/instinct, ‘thrust’ or implicated into situations where she has to confront her inability to respond adequately as pure Himba (human). At each stage, she relies on technological objects, aliens, alien heritage, and bio-space ships to form new solidarities and new hybrid relations and ends up gaining much more than the singular Himba identity that she starts with. Throughout the novels, Binti’s sense of who she is and therefore where she belongs is expanded and the phrase becoming ‘more than’ is repeatedly used to signal her growth/mutation. Towards the end of the trilogy, she comes to terms with her expanded sense of self, declaring herself as Himba, Meduse, Einyi Zinyari, and New Fish. In these stories, the posthuman hybrid is not just combining/assemblage of human and machine, but a revising of identities on both sides to make an ecological hybrid that is ‘conjoined’. The novels showcase how these new collectivities are a binding together of strange combinations and entities which open up new assemblages and networks of kinship that are requisite to move toward utopian futures.

5.5.3  The Decolonised University Perhaps of most interest to those of us invested in the workings of educational institutions is the presentation of Oomza University itself and its responses to situations in a utopian speculative mode. The university functions as a centre of knowledge creation; it seeks to attract the best and brightest from the farthest corners of galaxies and is only 5% human. It is shown to invite Binti into its portals when there has been no other Himba woman previously. Yet the university’s established frameworks of knowledge are not fully sufficient to meet the challenges that Binti faces. For instance, they are unable to make sense of the edan. At other times, they are bemused by her otjize adorned hair, but tolerate it as an exotic practice. Binti has to find ways of working with the alien Meduse, the indigenous Enyi Zinyari, and persuade her own people to offer up their traditions, experiences, and resources to seek a resolution to the Khoush-Meduse warfare (and to survive it). It is not clear if the

5.5  Okorafor’s Africanfuturist, Decolonised Utopia

129

institution is aware of these alternate sources of knowledge or if it is open to accepting these different knowledges in a way that would challenge and transform itself. In all this, Oomza is very much a mirror of most contemporary educational institutions and practices. When Binti seeks to mediate between the university and the Meduse, she draws on a ‘rights framework’ that mirrors ‘present-day indigenous claims of cultural sovereignty and demands for redress, as well as demands for meaningful and transformative inclusion in educational institutions such as the university’ (Davis, 2020, 47). The Meduse chief’s stinger  – a culturally significant artefact as well as an actual body part – was a means for the university to benefit scientifically and possibly economically too. When Binti intercedes on behalf of the Meduse, pointing out the injustice of the situation, she does so hoping for a favourable reaction because ‘these professors were educated beyond anything I could imagine’ (Okorafor, 2015, 76). While the novel presents a turnaround in policy, practice, politics, and ethics for the institution based on their supposed lack of knowledge, even ignorance about these unlawful acts, it seems highly unlikely that the university was unaware of the underlying politics of housing a Meduse stinger stolen by Khoush scholars. At any rate, the university responds with an unequivocal apology and an assurance that the perpetrators will be expelled and exiled. The university reiterates ‘Museum specimen of such prestige are highly prized at our university, however such things must only be acquired with permission from the people to whom they belong. Oomza protocol is based on honor, respect, wisdom, and knowledge. We will return it to you immediately’ (Okorafor, 2015, 78). A fulsome apology and quick repatriation of the stinger sees the enactment of the utopian alternative for this educational institution. Whether they were shamed into returning it and used the cover of ‘ignorance’ for not having done the right thing in the first place remains unclear. But the end result explicitly rejects a ‘corporate model of education and compels the university community to respect the function of education as an instrument of peace and transcultural connection’ (Davis, 2020, 53–54). As Davis perceptively acknowledges, In a book about today’s corporate university, this would be the beginning of a narrative arc about her eventual loss of faith and growing cynicism about the potential of the university to escape the limitations of the exploitative and racist power structures of late capitalism in which it is embedded. But Binti’s narrative provides other ways of imagining and inhabiting the university. Thus, in this fictional world, she offers a model of the university realized in practices that truly honor diverse knowledges and claims for authority, as well as access to education. (2020, 51, emphasis mine)

The importance of taking action to heal traumas of the past against the agendas of scientific and commercial interests allows Okorafor to demonstrate the university as the site for cultural and epistemic reparations. Such an unequivocal positioning of the institution locates it within strong moral, ethical, political frameworks of functioning and is another utopian imaginary for emulation. In the strange way that life imitates art, in 2021 we heard of the University of Aberdeen in the UK, announcing the return of the Benin bronzes back to Nigeria.

130

5  Part III: Utopia

5.5.4  Space and Belonging In my conversations with young people, their worst fears for their futures seemed to centre around the idea of irreconcilable social divisions particularly in the British post-Brexit context. Identity and culture wars were seen as divisive and as destroying any sense of the ‘common’ that could hold diverse peoples together. Okorafor’s futuristic imaginaries of space offer a way of bringing together difference in utopian ways. In Binti, each of the three novels is about travel  – travel away from home to Oomza University, travel from Oomza to home, and travel from home to the Rings of Saturn and then to Oomza University. Binti’s growth is kick-started with a desire to leave for learning but the leaving is never a leaving-behind, but an ‘adding to’. Her horizons are constantly expanding and she finds that she belongs to several races/species as well as places. This extends from her geographically specific homeland of the Himba to a cosmological scale where she finds herself communing with beings from the Rings of Saturn. This is not a smooth or easy process for Binti. Binti feels unmoored rather than freed and often breaks down at the sense of moving away from her beloved Himba identity. Book 3 shows her coming to terms with her new sense of self, with help from a Khoush doctor who suggests that her sense of family is now several, rather than less. This sense of scale extends not just her sense of self, but the presence of Africa itself well beyond Earth. In these and other novels (such as Lagoon), Okorafor uses aliens and marine creatures to challenge the idea of belonging as possible, or more authentic if there is a link to natality, ancestral heritage, or even long-term residence. Okwu is shown to revel in water, as the Meduse are aliens with a long-ago relationship with water that was severed. He and other Meduse indeed choose to remain hidden beneath the lake in Binti’s home town before the final battle with the Khoush. Their sense of feeling ‘at home’ in these waters in spite of having no relationship with water within their living memory shows how feeling ‘at home’ can occur at unexpected moments/places. This move also brings to mind the originary narrative of all life on Earth starting from beneath the waters. Stretching from this origin of all life to travel to the Rings of Saturn, the scale and scope of existence is expanded to suggest belonging can happen anywhere. This idea of mobility to find home and migration not hindering a sense of belonging or community is a central theme to the worlds of Okorafor. Such ‘transgressive mobility’ is not just an option but a condition for this new broader sense of community as each place adds to the migrant identity, growing them and making them ‘more than’. In contrast to cosmopolitan mobility rights which are always linked to privilege and wealth, the books use the idea of ‘spatial plasticity’ – a way in which relations with place are expanded beyond the fixed ideas of where their boundaries begin or end (Crowley, 2019). They show how the idea of being an ‘alien’ is a matter of scale – ‘there is no fundamental reason to consider someone from another planet as any more alien than someone from a different house in one’s neighborhood. It is, rather, a function of how we choose to understand the boundaries of that “neighborhood”’ (Crowley,

5.6  Imagining Utopias, Educating Desires

131

2019, 272). ‘Alien’ only makes sense through a failure to recognise the scale of relationships. Such contestations of spatial politics reveals places as always constituted by agency, and not just human agency, but also through the plant/animal/alien claims. Okorafor’s worlds show a grand sense of scale, one that is intergalactic, where notions of hegemonic, place-based identities are thwarted. This speaks directly to fears of culture wars linked to belonging, authenticity, and hegemonic identity-making that emerged powerfully during and after the Brexit referendum that raised anxieties for many young people. It exposes the limitations of traditional notions of place-based identity and the utopian possibilities of becoming more and several. In Binti we see a protagonist who gradually starts from her Himba-centred, regional, and ethnic identity to accommodate alien DNA, showing a utopian imaginary of belonging. As a Nigerian-American writer, Okorafor echoes a Pan-Africanist vision for communities of colour to draw on cultural heritage and be recognisably African while still being active participants and leaders in global futures beyond Earth. Her heritage/knowledge allows her to situate real places in Africa today in a faraway future and in doing so, fashion alternative narratives about place, identity, belonging, and shared destinies that upset older narratives that seem stuck in an impasse. One of the most evident breaks that Okorafor offers is the narrative about Africa itself. In a break from portrayals of Africa as a place of ‘Afuturity and Afropessimism’ (Rettová, 2017, 159), Okorafor adopts a narrative that enables ‘Africans to stake claims for themselves in the global imaginary as technocultural agents’, working to ‘forge new relations to themselves, the rest of the world, and futuricity itself’ (Tsika, 2013, 50–51).

5.6  Imagining Utopias, Educating Desires The case for how speculative fiction can act as a curricular resource for young people has already been made well. Harrison (2019) and Tarr and White (2018) focus on young adult dystopian literature to list several benefits of how the books provide models for young people finding their way in the world and of how well suited the genre is for its readership’s struggles to remake the world. They are seen as allowing critical, alternative imaginaries to expand. Equally well made is the case for how SF can be used in research (Rousell et al., 2017; de Freitas & Truman, 2021). Here I am more interested in the role they enact, when they invoke alternative desires and provoke difficult questions about the field of education itself. Such meta-cognitive provocations do not just point to how a learning outcome can be achieved. They ask bigger questions about the stratified nature of educational practice and how it can be made afresh. The pedagogies of Afrofuturistic fiction can be critical as well as generative of new desires in readers. They can also be a stimulus for thinking of how better and different futures can be realised, particularly when our imaginations feel trapped in the weight of the present. In my encounters with young people, they had no trouble identifying what they feared and were explicit about the sort of

132

5  Part III: Utopia

monstrosities of the present that they would like to leave behind. But it was much harder to imagine different utopias, much harder to know where to begin to desire otherwise, and even harder to imagine these to the point of ‘feeling’ them, as Levitas suggests. An immersive experience in the alternative worlds of Afrofuturism can potentially allow ideas that are cognitively understood to seep into and alter consciousness. The critique of the present (and a disavowal of it as an element of the future), however, brings into the argument two other threads that are vital to any utopian creation project – the circular nature of time, (e.g. the traces of the past in the future) and the fostering of a posthumanist outlook that speaks to the condition of the Anthropocene. The books considered in this section have all attended to both these issues. They have looked into the deep future without indulging in historical amnesia. They foreground the principle that to forget unjust histories and their legacies is not only unfair to those who paid a heavy price in the past but also to their traces and inheritances in present peoples who cannot leave behind that past. Any move towards building new utopias needs to also break from humanist notions of progress and development. The dismantling of the human is thus central to this project. This includes the work of racial/caste hierarchies which all three authors, through their representations of slavery and power, exploitation of workers, or colonial habits in institutions consider thoroughly. They shine a light on what has traditionally been the blind spot of liberal humanism, bringing together race, gender, and ecological injustice. All three authors create assemblages of beings and materials which constitute and shape human and non-human protagonists, expanding our sense of what it is to be posthuman, showing new coalitions, belongings, and unorthodox partners. As Sorensen argues (2018), these works link ‘liberatory potential’ to the entanglements between such human and non-human beings. Rather than rely on heroic, strong-­ willed, and charismatic humans to provide the solution, these works stage an ensemble cast demonstrating this potential. If individual, human-sense of realist experience or perspective is no longer sufficient to grasp the pace and significance of the current epoch, then these African futurist stories help expand our (vicarious) experience and sense of scale, by making us ‘feel’ and ‘see’ them in radically altered futures. The direct response of young people to these works was not part of the inquiry for this book. Whether/how the worlds of fiction laid out by these three authors will be read or experienced through research activities as a resource to feed the imagination and instigate the change for new futures is hard to say. However when the books speak directly to particular concerns raised by the apocalyptic and/or revolutionary imaginaries, they are less easily consumable as ‘entertainment’, entertaining though they may be. Then, these texts impel us as readers and as students to engage in critical speculations about unfamiliar selves, imaginations, and lifestyles, thus feeding desires for better worlds. They can reveal that imaginaries of utopia are available in their alternative thousands and are part of our own education in desiring ‘otherwise’.

References

133

References Abensour, M. (1999). William Morris and the politics of romance. In M.  Blechman (Ed.), Revolutionary romanticism. City Lights Books. Ahmed, S. (2008). Imaginary prohibitions: Some preliminary remarks on the founding gestures of the “new materialism.”. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 15(1), 23–39. Anderson, B. (2010). Preemption, precaution, preparedness: Anticipatory action and future geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 34(6), 777–798. Ashcroft, B. (2017). Utopianism in Postcolonial literatures. Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group. Bereola, A. (2018, December). A true Utopia: An interview with N.K. Jemisin. The Paris Review. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/03/a-­true-­utopia-­an-­interview-­with-­n-­k-­jemisin/ Bloch, E. (1986). The principle of hope (3 Vols). Basil Blackwell. Bradley, J. (2017). Writing on the precipice. 21 February 2017. Sydney Review of Books. https:// sydneyreviewofbooks.com/writing-on-the-precipice-climate-change/ Brooks, L. (2018). Cruelty and Afrofuturism. Communication and Critical/Sultural Studies, 15(1), 101–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1435078 Bryant, R., & Knight, D. M. (2019). The anthropology of the future. Cambridge University Press. Butler, O. (2012a). Parable of the sower (Vol. 1). Open Road Media. Butler, O. (2012b). Mind of my mind (Vol. 2). Open Road Media. Butler, O. (2012c). Parable of the talents (Vol. 2). Open Road Media. Crowley, D. (2019). Cosmos and polis: Space and place in Nnedi Okorafor’s SF. Science Fiction Studies, 46(2), 268–288. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.46.2.0268 Curtis, C. (2008). Theorizing fear: Octavia Butler and the realist Utopia, Octavia Butler special issue. Utopian Studies, 19(3), 411–431. Davis, E. (2020). Decolonizing knowledge in Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy. In A.  Moore & S.  Pinto (Eds.), Writing beyond the state, Palgrave studies in literature, culture and human rights (pp. 43–63). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­34456-­6_3 de Freitas, E., & Truman, S. (2021). New empiricisms in the Anthropocene: Thinking with speculative fiction about science and social inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(5), 522–533. Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972–1990. Columbia University Press. Donner, M. (2018). “OPEN TO ME.  MAYBE I CAN HELP”: Networked consciousness and ethical subjectivity in Octavia E.  Butler’s mind of my mind. In A.  Tarr & D.  White (Eds.), Posthumanism in young adult fiction: Finding humanity in a Posthuman world (pp.  3–25). University Press of Mississippi. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv5jxn92.5 Dubey, M. (1999). Folk and urban communities in African-American Women’s fiction: Octavia Butler’s parable of the sower. Studies in American Fiction, 27(1), 103–128. Ferreira, M. (2010). Symbiotic bodies and evolutionary tropes in the work of Octavia Butler. Science Fiction Studies, 37(3), 401–415. http://www.jstor.com/stable/25746441 Gerber, L. (2019). Sensory materialism and N .K. Jemisin’s the fifth season, MA project paper, University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon. https://harvest.usask.ca/handle/10388/12245 Guattari, F. (2005). The three ecologies. Bloomsbury Publishing. Harrison, J. (2019). Posthumanist readings in dystopian young adult fiction: Negotiating the nature/culture divide. Lexington Books. Iles, A. (2019). Repairing the broken earth: N.K.  Jemisin on race and environment in transitions. Elementa Science of the Anthropocene, 7(1). https://www.elementascience.org/ articles/10.1525/elementa.364/ Jasanoff, S. (2005). Technologies of Humility: Citizen participation in governing science. In A. Bogner & H. Torgersen (Eds.), Wozu Experten? VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­322-­80692-­5_17 Jemisin, N. K. (2015). The fifth season: The broken earth 1. Orbit Books. Jemisin, N. K. (2016). The Obelisk Gate. Orbit Books. Jemisin, N. K. (2017). The stone sky. Orbit Books. Jemisin, N. K. (2018). How Long’til black future month? Stories. Hachette UK.

134

5  Part III: Utopia

Kehe, J. (2016, June 17). Fantasy writer N.K. Jemisin on the weird dreams that fuel her stories. Wired Magazine. https://www.wired.com/2016/06/wired-­book-­club-­nk-­jemisin/ Khan, K. (2012). The Kaiser’s Holocaust: The Coloniality of German’s Forgotten Genocide of the Nama and the Herero of Namibia. African Identities, 10(3), 211–220. https://doi.org/10.108 0/14725843.2012.715451 Kilgore, D., & Samantrai, R. (2010). A memorial to Octavia E. Butler. Science Fiction Studies, 37(3), 353–361. Le Guin, U. (1973). The ones who walk away from Omelas. In R. Silverberg (Ed.), New dimensions 3. Nelson Doubleday. LeGuin, U. (2017). No time to spare. Houghton Miflin Harcourt. Leong, D. (2016). The mattering of Black lives: Octavia Butler’s hyperempathy and the promise of the new materialisms. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2(2), 1–35. Levitas, R. (2011). The concept of utopia. Peter Lang. Levitas, R. (2013). Utopia as method. Palgrave Macmillan. Levitas, R. (2017) Where there is no vision, the people perish: A Utopian ethic for a transformed future. Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Property. http://cusp.ac.uk/essay/m1-­5 Michael, R. (2018, November, 1). Friday essay: How speculative fiction gained literary respectability. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/ friday-­essay-­how-­speculative-­fiction-­gained-­literary-­respectability-­102568 Mirzoeff, N. (2016). It’s not the Anthropocene, It’s the White supremacy scene; or, the geological color line. In R. Grusin (Ed.), After extinction (pp. 123–149). University of Minnesota Press. Moore, J.  A. (2018). Sankofa: Framing Afrofuturistic dialectical Utopias in NK Jemisin's the fifth season, Nisi Shawl’s Everfair, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti. MA thesis. The University of Alabama in Huntsville. https://cdm16608.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16608coll23/ id/55298/ Morris, W. (2002). News from nowhere. Broadview Press. Murphey, K. (2018). Science fiction/fantasy takes on slavery – N.K. Jemisin and Tomi Adeyemi. Pennsylvania Literary Journal, 10(3), 106–115. Nadir, C. (2010). Utopian studies, environmental literature, and the legacy of an idea: Educating desire in Miguel Abensour and Ursula K. Le Guin. Utopian Studies, 21(1), 24–56. Newkirk, V. (2016). N.K. Jemisin and the politics of prose: A conversation with the recent Hugo Award-winner about science fiction, race, gender, power, and Trumpism’. Fantasy Literature. http://www.fantasyliterature.com/author-­interviews/n-­k-­jemisin/ Okorafor, N. (2015). Binti. Tor. Okorafor, N. (2017). Binti: Home. Tor. Okorafor, N. (2018). Binti: The night masquerade. Tor. Payne, S. (2016). A space for knowledge: Diversity, education, and accessibility in Binti. https:// cdn.dal.ca/content/dam/dalhousie/pdf/fass/research/Shannon%20Payne_Mushkat_Binti.%20 FASS%20Submission..pdf Rettová, A. (2017). Sci-fi and Afrofuturism in the Anglophone novel: Writing the future and the possible in Swahili and in Shona. Research in African Literatures, 48(1), 158–182. Rousell, D., Cutter-Mackenzie, A., & Foster, J. (2017). Children of an earth to come: Speculative fiction, geophilosophy and climate change education research. Educational Studies, 53(6), 654–669. Savransky, M., Wilkie, A., & Rosengarten, M. (2017). The lure of possible futures: On Speculative Research. In A. Wilkie, M. Savransky, & M. Rosengarten (Eds.), Speculative research: The lure of possible futures (pp. 1–18). Taylor & Francis. Sorenson, L. (2018). The apocalypse is a nonhuman story. ASAP/Journal, 3(3), 523–546. https:// doi.org/10.1353/asa.2018.0038 Stillman, P. (2003). Dystopian critiques, utopian possibilities and human purposes in Octavia Butler’s Parables (Essays on Octavia Butler). Utopian Studies, 14(1), 1–56. Suvin, D. (1979). Metamorphoses of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre. Yale University Press.

References

135

Tarr, A., & White, D. (Eds.). (2018). Posthumanism in young adult fiction: Finding humanity in a posthuman world. University Press of Mississippi. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv5jxn92.4 Tsika, N. (2013). Projected Nigerias: Kajola and its contexts. In M.  Bould (Ed.), Paradoxa 25 (pp. 93–118). Paradoxa. Walter, J. (2019). Gender forum; Köln Issue 73: 2–25, 71. The human and its others: A posthumanist reading of Tomi Adeyemi’s children of blood and bone and N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. Warnlof, C. (2000). The ‘discovery’ of the Himba: The politics of ethnographic film making. Africa (pre-2011), 70(2), 175–191. Winterburn, E. (2011, February 17). Astronomical instruments through time. BBC History. http:// www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/cultures/astronomical_instruments_01.shtml Womak, Y. (2013). Afrofuturism: The world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture. Lawrence Hill Books. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black Anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press. Zaki, H. (1990). Utopia, dystopia, and ideology in the science fiction of Octavia Butler. Science Fiction Studies, 17(2). Science Fiction by Women, pp. 239–251. Zamalin, A. (2019). Black Utopia: The history of an idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism. Colombia University Press.

Chapter 6

Pedagogies for a Post-Anthropocene World

The Anthropocene is that epoch that shines an unrelenting light on the failures of modernity and Enlightenment thought that sought to separate nature from culture, mind from body, and consolidated racial and social hierarchies in the name of progress. The consequences of these failures are evidently more than academic and have reverberated through the ages to significantly impact the future of life itself. The daily onslaught of scientific data and evidence about extinctions, glacial melts, carbon concentrations, and contaminations is overwhelming. The Anthropocene’s ‘reckless’, ‘runaway’ qualities (Hird, 2017) reinforce the fact that we can no longer reliably predict or control ‘imprescriptible’ futures. The Anthropocene exceeds our capacity to generate adequate knowledge and our capacity to act in response (Weinstein & Colebrook, 2017). To talk at this point, of shortening the Anthropocene through academic endeavour can feel like another exercise in human hubris. And yet, the irrepressible impulse to act in the face of futility/meaninglessness is embedded in different ways within the three imaginaries explored in this book. One response to this wicked situation is to attempt ‘making’ alternatives to the present, to seek to craft futures that are not tied to the inevitability of old teleologies of capitalism or colonialism. As a wide range of scholars  – Levitas, Abensour, Baldwin, and Arendt – some referenced in the book have noted creating newness has to begin in the realm of imagination. Each of the three youth-originated imaginaries  – apocalypse, revolution, and utopia  – evokes different sets of affect and aesthetics that orient us towards the future and prompt us to act in particular ways. To this extent, the Anthropocene is also an opportunity for exercising cathedral thinking, an imperative to continue to have a vision for far away, desirable futures that we will not live to see. What we could do in response is something for entire fields, not just subject specialists or experts in the environmental sciences or in sustainability education, to attend to. If the Anthropocene becomes the visible and central focus of academic fields, how would they function? For instance, can the impetus for ushering in a post-­ Anthropocene define what comes to be a relevant problem for Education? How can © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 E. Priyadharshini, Pedagogies for the Post-Anthropocene, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5788-7_6

137

138

6  Pedagogies for a Post-Anthropocene World

we get the field to function at the different scalar and temporal levels that the Anthropocene demands – at the level of diverse everyday bodies/lives and those of planetary needs? How would education seek to become the space of the cultivation of desire for the post-Anthropocene? What might replace or extend our current concepts, repertoire of topics, segmentation of areas of study, and ontological schema? This book has revealed how this impetus can require that we re-conceive well-worn categories and labels, such as that of child/youth or learner and consider what attitudes we may need to adopt in ‘studying with’ this moment. I hope this turn of questioning explains why this book has not addressed how educational systems must be redesigned, what curriculum must be developed, or how pedagogies must be reoriented. It has been interested in why education as practice and research needs to squarely face up to the conditions of the Anthropocene even if they are not (yet) perceived as affecting everyday practice as currently visible. As one way of starting to respond, this book has suggested that we attend to the alien qualities of youth which make them worthy study companions. The fragments of youth presented here indicate that many young people and children have already grasped at instinctive, intellectual, and/or affective levels the fact that the Anthropocene hints at vastly different futures to the ones we have tended to imagine, educate, and plan for. Many of them ‘know’ this and I hope this book allows us to acknowledge that we know that they know this. With/through them, the pedagogies of the Anthropocene and those for a post-Anthropocene become visible and offer an opening for new orientations for various disciplines/fields.

6.1  Pedagogies of Apocalypse What lessons do youth imaginaries of the apocalypse yield, at the Anthropocene? They teach us perhaps that the imaginary of apocalypse does not deserve its poor reputation, that it offers us critical insights into past, present and possible future worlds. Its ability to shine a light on current monstrosities and act as a warning for the future is a precious and most often underrated virtue. In the narratives of youth, the apocalypse was rarely a singular event or moment, but something that was evoked through the recurrence of everyday instability, injustice, frustration, or obstacle. It may encompass relations at/with school, home, or the wider world and manifest as matters that signal their status and value. What contributed to make the imaginary ‘apocalyptic’ was the fear that current relationships and structural formations would barely change, that they would follow them to set up undesirable futures. This imaginary was thus a useful tool in identifying the undesirable – the ‘what needs to go’. Across the various modes of engagement with youth perceptions of the future, their desires for their futures coalesced around matters of modest security – jobs, housing, costs of further study, and access to health services. The more apocalyptic or dystopian fears were to do with the growth of culture wars, a lack of the ‘common’, worsening social hierarchies and divisions, and a depleted planet, leaving

6.1  Pedagogies of Apocalypse

139

impoverished futures for all. Given the numerous reasons for despair and pessimism, it is entirely logical that the apocalypse functioned as a frame of intelligibility, a way of making sense of the moment and its plausible trajectory. Perhaps the most disturbing feature was the persistent theme of lack of trust/faith in older generations, governments, or institutions to build secure and sustainable futures that would be desirable to live in. The notes of disappointment and skepticism in youth voices – ‘they won’t go there’, ‘not worth convincing them’, ‘prove me wrong’ – lend weight to the sentiment that children/youth are not valued as important, compared to older generations and that the elders may not be concerned in the same way they are, with the necessary urgency about the future. This allows for some youth to articulate ‘unacceptable’ propositions about the value of different lives and the question of intergenerational justice. Youth’s apocalyptic imaginaries of the futures revealed a world that is largely divorced from more privileged educator/researcher positions. Their marginal, even disenfranchised positions highlighted not just a different worldview but different worlds themselves. Their departures from the orthodox narratives of popular culture or adult preparations for the future of the world reinforce this notion. Their experiences, concerns, beliefs, and propositions for a different education in a different future suggest they deserved to be treated as a distinct, ‘alien’ category. This need not negate traditional duties to protect, safeguard, or educate them or, worse, to carry on ‘othering’ them, but rather is an ontological shift from the habitual position of assuming they fall within the category of ‘human’ and may not be too different from educators or researchers. This kind of thoughtful consciousness of the ‘alienation’ of youth and their not fully human worlds can generate in educators/researchers, the capacity to be surprised, even confounded by their imagination, desires, and demands. Attention to such difference then makes it less easy to ignore or dismiss the contemporary condition of youth that has given rise to apocalyptic imaginaries in the first place. Perhaps it also makes it less easy to salvage the category of human itself? The imaginary’s unflinching appraisal of the monstrosities of the present evoked in youth, fears, anxieties, and anger – teleoaffects that generated a desire to act. The actions were varied, from trying to ensure the individual’s survival in a zombie apocalypse to that of preserving diverse forms of life on the planet more broadly. Acting in the face of meaninglessness and fear was also a way of finding relief from the relentless negativity and opened new grounds in terms of what else can be desired. That such significant learning around matters of ‘how to be’ in the world is largely outside the remit of schooling and education was disappointing to them. These disaffections were compounded by the distance of the desired curricular content informed by the apocalyptic imaginary. Survival skills useful for imagined dark futures seem outside the possibilities of mainstream school curriculum, but perhaps this is not so unthinkable anymore after the instabilities and precarities revealed by a global pandemic. Such demands for a curriculum of relevance and of what ‘matters’ raise implications about what education could be about, if it is willing accommodate the idea that the telos of education in the Anthropocene is indeterminate.

140

6  Pedagogies for a Post-Anthropocene World

An education with this acceptance of indeterminacy of futures can be imagined, for instance, as an explicit experiment that is committed to lifelong, perpetual, study – one that sees everyone (including those whose assigned role is ‘teacher’) as students (Harney & Moten, 2013), and one which encourages all students to speculate about and anticipate desired change. This context can include opportunities for students to articulate both desired and undesirable or feared futures and learn to act to bring into existence preferred scenarios over undesirable ones. This requires curriculum to be more responsive and response-able to the lives of learners and a pedagogy that is interventive, perhaps even D-i-Y (Gibbons & Snake-Beings, 2018), that is, open to experimentation, risk, and change.

6.2  Pedagogies of Revolution The demands for system change locate us firmly within the imaginary of revolution. The School Climate Strikes were an arena in which youth enacted their desire for ‘wresting intellectual control from the elders’. I have continued to call these events School Climate Strikes (rather than the Fridays for Future movement) as SCS is an accurate descriptor of what was being attempted, and also because it links us to the institution of School, which was deployed as the foil for activism. It was the act of striking from school, of leaving the school premises without authorisation, of starting by inviting each other within their classrooms and year groups in school that made the revolutionary imaginary unambiguously visible. The strikes are a political-aesthetic movement that force an acknowledgement of how youth activisms are alive and how they appear in new guises, bringing together age-old institutions, contemporary social media networks, digital platforms, and the spectacle of public protest and assembling them to work in newly productive ways. Their use of networks has been responsive to emerging events and different needs (for instance, to amplify other social justice movements such as BLM or as support for lone youth strikers in risky contexts) and evidence different temporal sensibilities (for instance, a lack of concern about becoming immediately recognisable to algorithms or seeking short-term media spikes for more visibility). The young, largely female, figureheads also used their identities openly and did not attempt to ‘soften’ their messages to more hopeful ones that are often the feature of digital elements of political movements. Studying their evolving use of the hybrid media environment can also aid the study of the creation of ‘publicness’ (Kavada & Poell, 2021; Biesta, 2019). If apocalypse allows us to develop a sense of the things that need to go, then revolution, in the form of these strikes, allowed youth to foster and communicate a sense of how and why they wish to live differently. The school climate strikers advocate that to live differently is a task for both individuals and systems, in private and in public, one that makes demands on both self and society. These demands did not shy away from the ‘unappealing’ messages of discipline, restraint, and the ‘sacrifice’ of consumerist lifestyles but also reveal that such austerity holds a different

6.2  Pedagogies of Revolution

141

appeal, standing for the interests of all life on the planet. The ‘less thans’ of these lifestyles were to protect the ‘more thans’ of life itself. This attempt to increase the scope of the ‘public’ to include non-human publics, indeed to show that human life is imbricated across multiple species and planetary materials, can be read as an act of public pedagogy – an act of creating a common sphere in the interests of a new kind of publics. These acts take us beyond a focus on the normative understanding of institutions, activities, or policies that will make a new future; they reveal an affective engagement with a future that they can ‘feel’ and are moved by, in the present. Although the imaginary of revolution manifests the drive to action much more urgently, it is still compatible with visionary, long-term, cathedral thinking. The demands to ‘Teach the Future’ are a direct plea to education to take a critical look at how its organisation and agendas should be reconfigured to meet the longer-term challenge of creating and maintaining the post-Anthropocene. The strikers also illustrated the link between learning/knowledge and social justice/moral actions. Here, the imaginary’s most significant lesson seemed to be its demonstration of the swapping of the traditional roles of teacher and taught, adult, and youth. In the SCS, fear and shame were used strategically by youth to cajole, threaten, or shock older generations who may have greater capacities to enact systemic change. They raised questions of what obligations the generations have towards each other and to life in a future that the old will not live to see. In all of this, youth actions and demands suggested other, more improved roles for adults beyond obtuse, myopic, or authoritarian ones. Here too, treating the category of youth as alien (not a subset of the Human) affords greater scope to the task of learning about, learning with, and learning from youth. Of course, this revolution cannot, by itself, produce the desired alternative future. Push backs from authorities prioritising the safeguarding of ‘vulnerable’ children from radicalisation may even produce a resurgence of dominant norms and orders. But this imaginary demonstrates the possibility of new desires and is an invitation (and a threat) to reorient our trajectories away from the inevitables to the preferred. If the imaginary of apocalypse was intent on promoting a curriculum for the survival of (human) life, then revolution asked for one focused on sustaining all life. As all aesthetics is about the selected visualisation and appreciation of what is worth saving or worth letting die, the school climate strikes allowed the development of an aesthetic that articulated a resistance to extractive economics, capitalist consumption, and an exclusionary definition of ‘public’ that treats non-human life (nature) as separate and as ‘less than’ (culture). If learning to desire better, and desire otherwise, is an educational task in this epoch, then the imaginary of revolution with its focus on activism, action, and system change challenges fields/disciplines to also desire better, to perhaps become more critically aware of our selective visualisation of what constitutes a worthy problem.

142

6  Pedagogies for a Post-Anthropocene World

6.3  Pedagogies of Utopia The utopias of Afrofuturism bring to life, social theory on utopia. When imagining alternatives becomes impossibly weighed down by the monstrous present, these Black utopias in Afrofuturism offer new worlds, relations, and desires. They provide us with a more desirable and more ‘investable’ kind of post-Anthropocene because they insist on paying attention to the conjoined problems of racial, economic, and ecological injustice. Their quality of optimism mixed with caution breeds sensibilities that are suspicious of easy fixes to age-old problems. In turn, they fulfil the key obligation of utopian thought to continually foster an awkward sense of longing – a space where disappointment or disaffection resides alongside the desire for better, thus engendering varied streams of new possibilities. They embody both an ethos of anti-apathy towards the present, and a wariness of easy futures. Abensour’s formulation of utopia (1999) as the perpetual desiring of better and other, always remaining open to the many possibilities and potentialities of new desires/utopias without foreclosing on any, is thus embodied in these fictions. Octavia Butler’s critical utopias with their emphasis on creating a common through networked, empathetic subjectivities born of interdependence, and the unorthodox paths to a politics that avoids hierarchies, dominance, and subversion; N. K. Jemisin’s visioning of multi-sensorial, non-extractive relationships with socio-material worlds, advocating the idea that suffering must never be an acceptable element of the world; and Nnedi Okorafor’s demonstration of the power of indigenous materialisms, of ever-expanding scales of space and belonging, ecological hybridity, and decolonised institutions, each speak to contemporary concerns of youth while offering myriad desirable alternative worlds. They demonstrate the potential in exploring non-anthropocentric perspectives and thus create plotlines that rupture old teleologies and suggest unorthodox routes to new futures. If the apocalypse teaches us to recognize what needs to go, and revolution reveals that living with ‘less than’ is possible and necessary, then these utopias fleshed out in Afrofuturistic literature teach us how to imagine and desire better. The genre as a whole and the specific authors/texts used in this book manage to account for social and ecological injustices of the past/present while doing so in a way that brings posthuman ideals to life in new futures. As we look for ways to better equip ourselves and young people, this kind of speculative fiction can be a teaching resource for all. They are a demonstration of a new aesthetic – the visualisation of what can become newly valuable/beautiful/worthy. In this they are more than just curricular resources that mainly direct learners to set learning outcomes within defined subject areas. These instead are pedagogical texts that illustrate possibilities to be inventive, imaginative, and experimental and generate new desires that can replace the aesthetics of an older order. The epoch of the Anthropocene is a pivotal moment for the survival of life on the planet. It is also a moment demanding that academic disciplines and practices urgently reinvent their priorities and practices. Each of these imaginaries offers

References

143

myriad teaching-learning moments that spill beyond academic boundaries and their carefully constructed constituencies. These imaginaries each point to both the urgency of the current planetary crisis as well as to the openings available for altering this moment. They inaugurate the process of fabulating alternative worlds and the people-to-come.

References Abensour, M. (1999). William Morris and the politics of romance. In M.  Blechman (Ed.), Revolutionary romanticism. City Lights Books. Biesta, G. (2019). Making pedagogy public: For the public, of the public, or in the interest of publicness? In Obstinate education (pp. 130–140). Brill Sense. Gibbons, A., & Snake-Beings, E. (2018). DiY (do-it-yourself) pedagogy: A future-less orientation to education. Open Review of Educational Research, 5(1), 28–42. Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. Research Collection, Lee Kong Chian School Of Business. Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/ lkcsb_research/5025 Hird, M. (2017). Proliferation, extinction, and an Anthropocene aesthetic. In J.  Weinstein & C.  Colebrook (Eds.), Posthumous life: Theorizing beyond the posthuman (pp.  251–269). Columbia University Press. Kavada, A., & Poell, T. (2021). From Counterpublics to contentious publicness: Tracing the temporal, spatial, and material articulations of popular protest through social media. Communication Theory, 31(2), 190–208. Weinstein, J., & Colebrook, C. (Eds.). (2017). Posthumous life: Theorizing beyond the posthuman. Columbia University Press.